Brainstorm in Progress: Open Education 2013

Showing posts with label Open Education 2013. Show all posts

Wednesday, November 06, 2013

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: 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: 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.