Brainstorm in Progress: #opened13

Showing posts with label #opened13. Show all posts

Thursday, November 07, 2013

Open Ed 13: Hacking the Syllabus in Saskatchewan

Official seal of Saskatoon

I met Jordan Epp this morning. I was looking for a place to sit down in the big hall early this morning and he was the only one still smiling while drinking the conference coffee - I had to meet him! How could you pass up such an undaunted spirit? Anyway, it was a great conversation, he is an instructional designer from the University of Saskatchewan and lives in Saskatoon, and he said something that has stuck with me all day. We were talking about open textbooks and how many students don't buy textbooks. He said that in their study of students they found students that did well in the course who did not buy the text book. They contacted the students and asked how they managed to do so well in the class without buying the textbook. One of them said that he took the outcomes from the assignment listed in the syllabus and copied them into Google. He chose the link that had the most matched words and just read articles on the internet.This hits me on two levels; first, the instructor is brilliant for having such well articulated outcomes for the assignments. That instructor knows what they are teaching. The second, is that the student is brilliant for understanding the purpose of the outcomes. This course would be low-hanging fruit for conversion to an OER-based course.

The process for converting a class to an open textbook class is to look at the course outcomes, see how the current textbook aligns with the outcomes and then either finding an open textbook that meets those outcomes or customising an open textbook with other open education resources to meet them. Sometimes this process starts with "what is a course outcome?"

Wouldn't it be great if this student does not have to play Sherlock Holmes and basically build his own textbook? A third thought would be - someone should keep an eye on that student, he will make a great teacher or instructional designer one day!

Jordan, here is that picture of the moose in Saskatoon.

Opening Up Assessment: Open tools and item banks

"One of the defining characteristics of Open Education has been the widespread sharing of course materials from OpenCourseWare to Open Textbooks to more generally open educational resources (OERs). Unfortunately many OERs are primarily content or course materials and do not include sufficient quizzes or other activities that students can use to check for understanding and that instructors can use to track engagement and performance. Research shows that embedding assessments in texts increases student completion rates and learning. Open Assessment complements existing OER efforts with tools to allow instructors to embed assessments in any OER, and to create shared collections of assessment items.

MIT and Open Tapestry are developing tools and services to allow instructors and authors to embed assessments directly in any content (e.g., in any OpenCourseWare course) thereby providing a richer learning experience. And BYU will be developing validated item banks of open assessments that can be shared (which will be developed by domain experts and psychometricians). Our approach differs from current practice because existing tools require one of two things: either a system that presents both content and assessments together as part of a dedicated system or the the learner is required to leave the content to take an assessment in a separate quiz system breaking the flow of learning. To be able to embed an assessment of your choosing in any existing OER wherever it might be presented will be truly powerful.

This panel presentation will provide conference participants the opportunity to understand how to use the tools, existing and forthcoming open assessment item banks, and how to use open assessment in their OER content regardless of where it's located right away."

http://openassessments.com

Content and assessment are always separate. Typically, you look at content and then go out and take an assessment. This might not be the best way to learn.

These assessments can be embedded anywhere. Focusing on formative assessment. Self-check of their own understanding and eliminates issues around cheating. - there are self-assessments in the materials - a "hide the answer" approach.

Examples are in Saylor.org of static tests. OCW Scholar focuses on self-learners has .pdf questions.

OpenAssessments.com has each item with an embed code much like the embed code that you will find in YouTube.

It will import test questions using QTI format.

Integrated with Open Tapestry. http://opentapestry.com

Open Tapestry lets you edit versions of websites.

David Wiley talked about the creation of item banks. Faculty are sometimes loathe to adopt open textbooks because the commercial textbooks often come with testbanks. A Hewlett grant has funded the creation of openly licensed textbooks.

Global Open Textbook Projects: Pathways to Adoption

Open Textbook bill (Photo credit: opensourceway)

"Mary Burgess of the BC Open Textbook Project will discuss how she and her team are working to produce 40 Open Textbooks on a restricted budget and tight timeline. She will describe their work engaging faculty and student groups across the British Columbia Post Secondary System, efforts to make adoption and reuse easier for those groups, and how adoptions are being tracked.

They have seven speakers and three minutes each!
Producing 40 open textbooks in BC - they have done a lot of work on adoptions
4 workshops - on basic Open textoboks
Month long workshops - visited faculty - 15 meetings in departments and met with student groups and college administrators. Working with Libraries as well.
They created an advisory committee.
They have worked wiht communications to do pressreleases

Cable Green of Creative Commons will discuss how open policies, like those in British Columbia and California, are ensuring publicly funded resources are openly licensed. He will describe the global opportunity for governments and projects to collaborate to maximize the quality and quantity of OER.

David Harris, Editor in Chief, for OpenStax College will introduce the lessons learned from OpenStax College. OpenStax College has a rapidly growing adoption base of more than 175 institutions. David will discuss the strategies required for taking OER into the mainstream and the emerging interest in localized OER content.

Creating an ecosystem model - partnering with other groups to provide supplementary content.
Built an extensive database of faculty for communication and adoption
They go to tradeshows, conferences, etc.
Using social networks - faulty testimonials
Earned media - public relations through papers and magazines
Fear motivates but hope sells

Megan Beckett, Content Coordinator for Open Textbooks at Siyavula Education, will discuss their unique position as the South African government has printed the Siyavula textbooks for the whole country, thus jump starting the adoption of open textbooks in the K-12 sector. Megan will also discuss some ideas about engaging the community in the development of open textbooks which in turn feeds back into their adoption and widespread use.

Content creation in South Africa
The textbooks are collaboratively authored and backed by the government. 10 copies of their resources in SA. For some, this will be the first textbooks they will have ever seen. All the textbooks are mobile friendly and available online.Also available in print.
David Ernst, Chief Information Officer, College of Education and Human Development, and Executive Director of the Open Academics project at the University of Minnesota, will discuss common barriers to open textbook adoption by faculty and how the Open Academics project is working to help overcome those barriers.

Faculty often do not understand th cost of textbooks, the nature of the problem. They created engagement strategies - I need to contact him about these efforts. Created a repository.

Ethan Senack of the Student Public Interest Research Groups will discuss how students and other members of the campus community can drive OER adoption and advocacy through grassroots efforts.

Training student activists on campuses with the open textbook tool kit
Hold events to attract attention to the issue
Bring student testimonials to administrators

Connie Broughton of the Washington Open Course Library will discuss the project recently completed in which 81 open courses were created, including many open textbooks. She will detail their efforts to increase and track adoption during the creation of the resources and following the completion of that phase of the project."

Money from Gates and Legislature - hired faculty, instructional designers, and librarians. The outcomes were to produce course materials for $30 or less. They spent $1.5 mil and saved $5.5 mil.
They started a two week online course for finding open resources. Running surveys on faculty barriers to adoption. All CC by.

Open Ed 13: Audrey Waters

"Audrey Watters is a journalist, a high school dropout, and a PhD dropout – though she did complete a Master’s degree in Folklore. As a freelancer writing about educational technology, her stories have appeared on NPR/KQED’s MindShift blog, in O’Reilly Radar, on Inside Higher Ed, in The School Library Journal, on ReadWriteWeb, and in the Edutopia blog."

The Education Apocalypse
She said she was intimidated by following Gardner Campbell but felt that the bar was set lower by one of yesterday's presenters who never mentioned open education.

She opened with a quote from Yeats' "The Second Coming."
One of the dominate narratives of the education narrative is that we are in the End Times. She also quotes REM. She then discussed a televangelist's predictions of Judgement Day. It was a successful marketing campaign but not a good prediction.

She compared Kurzweil's vision of uploading our brains into computers with these visions and then referred to it as the "Rapture of the Nerds." (The Singularity=Rapture).

The End Times mythology permeates the discussions of education.

The founder of the Udacily predicts that there will only be 10 universites in the future.

The notion of "Disruptive Innovation" is also an apocalyptic myth. It is a truth, a sacred story that is unassailably true. "The Innovators Dilemma" is a sacred text. Everything gets labeled a disruptive innovation. Unexamined millenialism. The tech industry is a self-annointed disrupter.
The death of print, the web, the university, etc. We here this narrative in religious stories - there is the predictions of doom, end times, the destruction, then the heaven on earth.

The year 2000 had the apolcalypic myth of t Y2K bug. The year 2000 was a big year for End Times thining. If we believe that the world is about to end, how do we plan for education? Google's engineer believes in an apocalyptic vision of the Singularity. Others believe in Disruptive innovation.

Eschatology in computer error messages.

Harvard Business School's Clayton Christiansen discusses the "Church of New Finanace" - the high priests are the Business Professors like him. He gives an apocalyptic vision - education is doomed in public universities, private universities will be the salvation. It is inevitable - brick and mortar schools will be gone. He gives particular dates. It is about how to change business practices not how to change learning.

This is a move towards for-profit schools.

Why are we accepting these stories on faith? Why are we listening to these stories of education doom and salvation in the hands of tech and business instead of people?

[I think we believe gospels of Harvard Business School because we are a culture that values prestigious credentials rather than critical thinking.]

Wednesday, November 06, 2013

Open Ed 13: Emancipating Learning: a Journey to MOOCs and Beyond

"Some may think that Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are a fad, but they are raising some interesting questions about the scalability, accessibility and quality of online learning, as well as new thoughts about the higher education landscape. While a number of institutions have started to offer MOOCs, many are still wondering if and how to participate, as well as how these learning experiences relate to other online teaching and learning plans.

Are your institutional leaders tasking you what finding out more and determining what they should do about MOOCs? Are you wondering if and how you should get started? Are you curious about what it is like to develop and facilitate a MOOC and if it's worth the effort? Whether you?ve run a MOOC or are considering running one, this participants on the panel will provide the perspective and journey of three institutions which have run one more MOOCs: Cuyahoga Community College; State University of New York; and University of Illinois Springfield; on their MOOC journey. They will share insights, best practices, pitfalls and research results.

- Cuyahoga Community College (Tri-C) recently became the first community college in the nation to launch a MOOC -- free online classes to help students of all ages, including high school students preparing for college readiness, middle-aged workers returning to college to prepare for a new career and to middle-school students working ahead at Pre-Algebra pass developmental math, also known as remedial math, before they enter college. This course was developed using an innovative design to improve student engagement. The MOOC leverages game mechanics to motivate students? progress through the course. Sandy Moses and Sasha Thackaberry will provide highlights of the design, development and delivery process, along with results of their data analysis into course activity and student performance.

- State University of New York (SUNY) is hosting an open community course on Open Educational Resources and members of the team who designed the course will discuss the collaborative project. The team includes SUNY faculty, librarians, and instructional designers from several campuses who worked on the creation of an open course on OER designed for SUNY faculty and staff. The project has been designed to build critical thinking skills needed for creating, selecting, and evaluating open educational resources in the context of the online environment

- University of Illinois Springfield held a MOOC entitled "The Emancipation Proclamation: What Came Before, How It Worked, and What Followed" in early 2013. This was the second MOOC offered by UIS, following the eduMOOC of Fall 2011. Ray Schroeder, Michele Gribbins, Carrie Levin and Emily Boles will share their experiences and lessons learned in developing and delivering the MOOCs. Discussions will range from the effectiveness of technologies and activities used in the two MOOCs to insights from students regarding their motivation for participating in the MOOCs."

Sasha Thackaberry: Their MOOC is an xMOOC. They are using Mozilla Open Badges and game mechanics - a low-risk failure factor - the students can take and retake tests. MOOC data: 1372 enrolled, 809 participated, 147 successfully completed. Students had to complete a survey in order to get to the content. The survey gathered demographics and learning history.

Michelle Gribbens: Their second MOOC- it is on the Emancipation Proclamation. All of their problems were overcome by using Coursesites. I am interested in the Terms of Service from Blackboard which typically licenses all content. They used a lot of the Blaclboard tools in their courses. The MOOC was 8 weeks but she thinks that a 6 week MOOC would have been better. Most of the participants were over 50. sites.google.com/sites/openedmooc

opensuny.coursesites.com is an online course with a badge system.

Open Ed 13: What Teach a MOOC? Are you crazy?

Maria Andersen talks about her experiences with MOOCs.
Twitter: @busynessgirl
Email: busynessgirl@gmail.com

"If you've ever actually taught an online course, the thought of teaching a MOOC sounds like an absolutely crazy idea. It's hard to get past the idea that you might be multiplying all your ?online student? headaches by a factor of 100 or 1000. Well, those were my first thoughts about it too. However, what I learned was that teaching a MOOC has been the purest and most fun form of teaching and learning that I?ve ever done. Teaching a MOOC is a complete paradigm shift from traditional education in terms of the design, the assessment requirements, and the diversity of students. As the manager of courses for Canvas Network, we?ve learned a lot about how to design a good online course for students who struggle with English, span all the time zones in the world, and have very different learning goals. In this talk I will share my own teaching experiences and surprises and some of these design tips from our MOOC courses."

Designing a MOOC was a good exercise in gathering and curating OERs.

Got into teaching and started working for Canvas. She taught a Social Media class. She did this while designing courses for Canvas. Post MOOC thinking: don't make me go back to a regular class.

It is hard work.

Myth: "I've already got an online course for this. i can make it a MOOC easily."

Teaching a SPOC (small private online course) is like being the head of a neighborhood community; a MOOC is like managing a city.

There is a difference in the students: level of education - MOOC students tend to already have a college degree. The deadlines have to follow the global timelines

Motivations: typical college students are hostages; MOOC students are self-motivated experienced learners.

Time commitments are different.

Students often do not have access to scholarly journals. Use open access journals.

MOOC - not for credit, large course, all open resources; resources must be provided in the class.
The teachers role is a curator to the millions of resources on the internet.

Assessments - low-stakes and another opportunity to learn. It no longer matters - the assessment should be there to drive the learning.

The activities should provide a way to engage the real world.
One assignment was to get 50 followers on Twitter. Get them to think about who they want to follow and why and then lead them to get followers. This assignment had no assessment attached to it other than the outcome of 50 followers.

Discussions are the most powerful learning tools in MOOCs.

Types of Discussions
Help Forums
Showcase Forums - Ask students to show something to the class
Conversation Forum - not all students use forums in MOOCs. Pick topics to engage people
IRL Sharing: Lessons learned

MOOC students want to spend fewer hours per week and commt to less weeks. This doesn't mean you teach a less rigorous version of the same course. It means you teach a different course. It may mean you teach three couirses.

She would go after the alumni with money - don't charge the students. "Going after remedial students is not the way to go."

http://learn.canvas.net/courses/1

Open Ed 13: OERs Rule, MOOCs Drool: MOOCs and DistRibuted Open Online Learning

English: Blended learning methodology graphic

Michael Caulfield discussed how MOOCs are being used.

"The "wrapped MOOC" has gained attention over the past year as a way to integrate MOOCs into traditional education. This presentation will present results of interviews with practitioners of this method to show that in practice most educators are not "wrapping" the cohort experience, but are instead using the MOOC as robust OER. This trend is discussed in terms of "distributed flip" and "distributed blend" models, as well as David Wiley's joking but correct observation that MOOCs are distraction from the potential of DROOL (DistRibuted Open Online Learning). Implications include a hidden but high demand for robust, course-level OER, and the possible desirability of approaching blended learning from the online experience "backwards", as opposed to the traditional model which emphasizes the online refitting of an existing or assumed face-to-face experience."

Caulfield is from WSU Vancouver
Twitter @holden
Web; http://hapgood.us/

Examples of courseware evolution
Publisher resources, OLI (Carnegie Mellon, Stanford)
AASCU
Kaleidoscope Project

There is a history behind MOOCs - it is a progression over time.

What do MOOCs provide above and beyond what blended learning provides?
It is the global community of students going through the work at the same time.
The mythology of the xMOOC is the affordances such as 24/7 peer assistance

What does use of MOOCs for blended look like?
Amy Collier and Helen Chen held wide-ranging interviews with students and teachers.
Not Synched
They found that the local cohort was not linked to the online cohort.
They were using the MOOC purely as a digital resource.
This was because of the differences between course and institutional schedules - professors needed more flexibility in scheduling.
It is difficult for instructors to not fall behind.
Not Conversing
Students were not really using the forums of the MOOC at all.
The students looked at the forums occasionally and only sometimes posted. These students were meeting face-to-face
[It sounds like the learning was not social or truly interactive. and why would you do something that were not assessed?]
Unaffiliated students who watched 75% of the videos viewed the forums

Implications: do MOOCs Made Good Flip Materials
xMOOCs global classroom is not useful for blended learning - the students do not use the forums
The design of the course is mostly influenced by the global cohort
Problems
Data not available
Can't change schedule

Coursera is now working on decentralization.

Most instructors had gone through the MOOC before teaching it. That was a transformative experience for the teachers.

Summary
Courseware is a big part of the future of education
A growing number of options exist for materials
When used in flips, MOOCs often function primarily as content
MOOCs can be used, but think carefully about benefits and downsides of centralization

A community college teacher expressed concern over xMOOC content as content divorced from the local context. I feel the same way about most commercial textbooks.

Open Ed 13: Badge-Empowered Learning

An example digital badge.

Tami Echard and Jay Heap discuss on open source badge platform.

"Georgia Virtual Learning is developing a series of online professional development programs using BadgeOS, a powerful open source platform for rewarding learner achievement and community engagement and issuing digital micro-credentials [digital badges]. The session will explore options available through BadgeOS for designing, issuing and displaying micro-credentials at any organization. Some of the features available with BadgeOS include customizable implementations, extensive knowledge and community triggers for recognizing achievements and social contributions, and the idea of building an iTunes like open source badge and content library. Digital micro-credentials issued through BadgeOS are compliant with Mozilla Open Badge (OBI) standards and are opening up new job opportunities, exposing new learning pathways, and helping connect people with communities where they can have an impact and where their skills and experience are valued and needed. Digital micro-credentials can be issued to anyone ? in the elementary school setting to the corporate setting to people engaged and committed to lifelong learning"

We will look at software, technical requirements, planning, implementation and then take questions. Planning is the most important thing.

Software made by Learning Times. It used to be a program called "BadgeStack" and now it is a Wordpress plug-in.

Tech requirements: Wordpress and BadgeOS

Planning
Skills for teachers: Participate, navigate, create, communicate, evaluate
Competencies: Planning, web tools, OER and CC, Learning objects
Quests: Locating OER: find and image, text, learning object

Great illustration for their badge system - will link to presentation later.

Implementation
Using Discussion Post/Forums
The facutly posted to a blog or to a discussion post.
The discussion forum was in Wordpress.
There is a "quest" page telling them step-by-step what they needed to do to complete an assignment.
In BadgeOS, users can create quests (e.g. a locating OER quest)
It then lets you decide how they achieve the badge (earned by completing steps,points, submissions, activities, etc.)
There is the option to "Show Earners" and create a "Congratulations Text."

They chose badge awarded on "required steps." It can also be based on "Publish a page."

The system allow users to send to other systems like Credly.

Competency
Describes what the student learned. One could align assignment outcomes to this system.

All the competencies must be linked to a skill - this is why planning is essential.

The course uses "verifiers." A verifier gets paid $49 for verifying a students progress through the course.

They are at https://www.openteachertraining.org

Open Ed 13: Building an Online Course with Open Badges: a practical guide

My backpack (Photo credit: mathplourde)

Wade Weichel presented on open badges.

"You're interested in incorporating badges into your course to engage and motivate students and to track achievement against learning milestones and outcomes. You?d also like to incorporate open badge publishing. This session will help with your success by preparing you to 1) plan for a blend of badges from human recognition as well as system recognition; 2) determine what types of system recognition you can and should leverage; 3) combine peer- and instructor-determined badges; and 4) plan appropriately for publishing to the Mozilla Open Badge Backpack. This session is intended to be quick and practical, leveraging a simple approach reflective of emerging best practices for first-timers."

He recommended th work of Carla Cassili
http://carlacasilli.wordpress.com/category/badge-system-design-2/
http://carlacasilla.wordpress.com/2012/05/20

There is a badges MOOC: http://badges.coursesites.org

A simplified model - curricular and activity
Aligning competencies and learning outcomes
A badge can be issued by a teacher, activity or student

Tips
1. Team up
Work with others to get credibility and endorsements for your badging system.
2. Start with your course
Competencies and Learning/Project Milestones are good places to start
3. Create Competencies in your course
4. Leverage your LMS to manage and automate
Mozilla is recommended. They seem to be the one that is easiest to integrate. If not using Mozilla clearly articulate the descriptions and criteria
5. Check for Institutional Polices
There may be issues around institutional name and organizatyion
If there is no policy, consider yourself to be the issuer. (we should check with CEEE issuance of badges)
6. Focus on the carrot
Start with modeling behavior
Wait to make them linked to continuing to te next stage of the course
7. Combine Badges
Curricular and activity - action teacher and peer based badges
8. Delight Students with Surprises
Hidden badges for course behavior and encouraging good learning skills
9. Get Students Involved
Engage students by making them part of the process - peer review
10. Start with the Extrinsic
11. Keep it Simple
Use simple default badges
Use Creative Commons images for badge images.

He has a badge for every learning outcome.

Open Ed 13: Using Open Badges adn an Open Course to Enhance & Extend Learning

Daniel Randall, Buck Harrison, Dr. Richard West, and Garrett R. Hickman from Brigham Young University.

"We will present our design for an open badge system currently in use in an undergraduate technology course for education majors. Our design is an attempt to use badges and an open online course to not only enhance student learning but also to encourage continued learning once our course has ended.

Theoretical Background
Open badges can provide a credential for learning that occurs in a non-traditional setting, a space in which few institutions are providing credentials. This makes open badges a textbook example of a disruptive innovation. However, since badges can also be used in a traditional setting, universities and other traditional credentialing institutions can adapt by using open badges to enhance their current course offers and encourage lifelong learning in a non-traditional setting.

Design of our Badges
By creating and issuing open badges, we hoped to not only motivate students to meet higher standards of learning, but also encourage students to continue learning after completing the course and thus extend our students? learning beyond our one-credit course. To this end, our badge system is multi-tiered, open to students not currently enrolled at our institution, and is integrated into an open online version of the course.

Inspired by Mozilla?s ?constellations? from the early designs for their webmaker.org badge system, we decided to graphically organize and group together the various technologies students could choose to learn. Our system had three different levels of badges. The lowest level consisted of badges with a small scope; the second tier of badges represented mastery of larger technologies and corresponded to major projects in the course; and the third badge level represented course-level mastery of all technologies and concepts taught in the course.

We created additional levels of badges beyond our course to provide a way for teachers to learn how to successfully integrate into actual teaching experiences the technologies they have previously learned in our class.

Design of the Open Online Course
To help our former students continue earning badges (as there are more badges available than are needed to complete the course), or any inservice teacher, we created an open online version of the course. By using asynchronous video discussions, currently enrolled students and inservice teachers can interact with each other and discuss class topics, real-world challenges inservice teachers are experiencing, and ways to use technology in their specific subject. We believe this approach will help our current students have a more authentic experience in learning and preparing to use these technologies and bring to their attention challenges facing current teachers. We believe inservice teachers will benefit by not only learning technologies and earning badges, but by discussing with our current students to gain insights from a younger demographic.

Current findings
We have just recently collected data from the first semester implementation, and in our presentation will share this data on how our implementation of the badges impacted student achievement and motivation."

URL http://iptedtec.org

Sheryl Grant's "5 Buckets for Badge System Design"

Their Course - Integrating Technology in Education
The couirse is a 1 credit course, 3 major projects in which student selected a technology they wanted to integrate into an assignment.
The badge system had a course level badge, project level badge, and lower level badges.
The system had to be flexible to account for choices of technology that the students might choose.
The goal of the class is about how to appropriately plan for tech integration, not just learning tech.

Course is in Canvas but they wanted it to be more open so they used Wordpress: http:iptedtec.org/secondaryed/

All of their tutorials are online and openly licensed. It is open as they could make it and still maintain the integrity of the endorsement.

Clicking on any badge brings up the criteria behind the badge.

Badge issuer available on GitHub msedev/badges

A look at the open online course - using Canvas and running the course as a MOOC. The open online course would let students to get their endorsement and "brand." It is a truly open course - all content is openly licensed. Non-university students enrolled to earn badges but not university credit. Limited numbers. They are using the "free for teacher" account. They liked the quiz system and the feedback that could be provided. It also supports asynchronous video discussion boards.

In-service teachers were encouraged to enroll because the course was free. Only a few inservice teachers made it past the first week.

They have only been doing this for a year.

For the future, they need to scale the assessments. How do you bring in more students while maintaining the quality and academic integrity. They want to create a "smart dashboard." They want to research student motivation, teacher professional development, and employer perceptions.

Open Ed 13: George Siemens

"George Siemens is a Professor at the Center for Distance Education and a researcher and strategist with the Technology Enhanced Knowledge Research Institute (TEKRI) at Athabasca University in Alberta, Canada. He is the author of the Connectivism theory of learning and co-creator of the first MOOC in 2008."

MOOCs: How did we get here?

A different view than Andrew Ng's corporate model.

A bit of history
George began blogging and following Todd, Downes, etc. He was able to talk with innovative people outside of the institution. Most systems think that content is the start of the learning and his idea was that content was the by-product. We don't need content, we need good questions and community. Open learning was learning not owned by a system but created by people.

He described Wiley's Wiki Design - everything in a course is run in the open. He talked about the history of open learning through Connectivism and Connective Knowledge through Jim Groom's DS 106.

An alternative to institutional controlled tech, monolothic self/contained/ locked-in platforms, transmission pedagogies.

Knowledge is iterative and communal. So many people are involved in th production of knowledge that is hard to call it "owned."

He brought up the MOOC map and showed how MOOCs have "vomited" over the world. It is no longer an academic practice but a corporate enterprise.

MOOCs are not really new - distributed learning has a long history. People have been thinking about this for a long time. It is a mistake to disregard that history

Why MOOCs now?
It is a supply-side answer to decasdes fo change in demand-side learning.
Student profiles are changing - older students, more females, China and India are changing the profiles.

What is happening in MOOC research?
http://www.moocresearch.com
There are a lot hyped statements like "there will only be 10 universities in the future." Universities will increase in number because the students will be doubling in the next ten years. With the Gates Foundation grants - where were the researchers coming from? Most of the research is coming from th Education field and not just Computer Science.

Problems with MOOCs
MOOCs do not prepare a student to create, generate, solve and innovate. We need stuff that stirs the soul. They need to respond to society.

Openness is being lost in the conversation. The hype is driving the trends. Coursera does not care about openness.

What happened with MIT wanting to provide all course materials are open and now they are with EdX who wants to copyright everything.

Lack of innovation.

Dropout rates are totally irrelevant. We are missing out on an opportunity for real research.

MOOC providers are disconnected from the research in education.
They need to look at social and generative education models - they exclude them because their technology does not do that well.

We are norming from Coursera and edX and they are concerned with revenue models.

We need to refocus on creativity and knowledge generation. MOOCs are just part of the landscape of the current state of education.

A MOOC is a web, not a website. It is a network.

A Domain of One's Own - reclaim the web. gather t artifacts of your digital identy in a central place that you won and control.

Don't just hate MOOCs, but look for another

Open Ed 13: Andrew Ng

Image representing Andrew Ng as depicted in Cr...

Image via CrunchBase

"Andrew Ng is co-founder of Coursera, and developed the initial platform for Stanford’s online machine learning and databases classes that started the popularization of MOOCs. He wants to give everyone access to the best professors in the best universities in the world, for free. In his spare time, he runs the Stanford AI Lab, builds large scale brain simulations, and practices sucking at ping pong."

Ng is not here unfortunately he is Skyping in from Stanford. We were asked to turn off devices to clear up the bandwidth for him. The irony was pretty thick.

Ng is new to online teaching and went from reaching 400 students to 100,000 students. They have over 5.2 million students in just 2 years.

He demonstrated a Coursera course and the one-way delivery of information (Powerpoint and talking head). The videos can be played at 2x speed. The courses allow students to choose their path through the material.

Students learn best "by practicing the material." They have built in exercises and assessments into the material. They have pop-up assessments in videos. There is an app platform that they are using to build assessments. The courses allow four attempts at the quiz - they are more interested in mastery than in grades.

He discussed peer grading. Students are "trained" to assess student work. They are also required to grade the work of five students. Peer grading would be important for student-student interaction.

They developed a discussion forum that allows students to ask and answer questions. They are getting a 22 minute response time. They are also using advanced students as tutors and mentors. They are running experiments to build up community.

Coursera is capturing the re-entry and life-long learner - their average student is in their late 20s to early 30s.

They are now expanding courses internationally in many languages.

Benefit for the students: the verified certificate from an Ivy League college. One of the challenges of issuing a credential to 100,000 students - how do you know who is who? They are taking a picture w/photo id. They take a picture with a webcam and they track the "typing signature" which is analyzed by software.

He suggests that these courses could be best adopted by the flipped classroom model. He calls this the best of both worlds. He gave a definition of flipped classrooms. He is using the description of "flipped classroom" to solve the personal contact issues around his model of online courses.

Education should not just be for the elite - there should be opportunities for everyone.

Rory said that what you learn at Cousera belongs to Coursera - a private company will not let you use Coursera material for credit giving education that are restricted. Why isn't the university using a Creative Commons license? Ng said that it costs over 60k to build a class and they need to be "sustainable."

This is not "open" - the real question is why are they at an open education conference. Just because something is free to students does not mean that it is open. Open content should be licensed in a way that the content can be reused. Coursera is asking for a fee. There is also lot of reinventing the wheel here. A lot of the issues they are facing have already been dealt with in the 90s as online eduction was first being put together.