"This has led to some criticism that MOOCs are only suitable for more experienced learners and those who are technologically competent." My own experience tends to agree with this.
The completion rate for MOOCs is very low, as this article in The Atlantic
article in The Atlantic
Overblown-Claims-of-Failure Watch: How Not to Gauge the Success of Online Courses
Rebecca J. Rosen Jul 22 2012, 2:52 PM E
"If anything, the low rate of success is a sign of the system's efficiency." - it is easy to drop out. And this is not viewed as negatively.
Read Kop (2011), The challenges to connectivist learning on open online networks: learning experiences during a massive open online course
. A bit boring to start, certainly put the wife to sleep. Some good quotes and I appreciate the lurkers point of view. What I still want to know is, of the 40 to 60 active participants (activity defined by amount of posts, not internal reflection and the building up of evidence to support an idea) how many of them completed all the reading and made it to the end, compared to the lurkers? The biggest problem with this paper is it's lack of simple English. It seems to thrive on complex educational lingo and complex words and phrases when simple ones will do much better.
Read Daniel (2012), Making sense of MOOCs: musings in a maze of myth, paradox and possibility62, which provides a comprehensive review of MOOCs.
Bifurcated = divided into two
cMOOCs and xMOOCs. ?????
http://reflectionsandcontemplations.wordpress.com/2012/08/23/what-is-a-mooc-what-are-the-different-types-of-mooc-xmoocs-and-cmoocs/
These organisations provide one interpretation of the MOOC model. They focus on concise, targeted video content – with short videos rather than full-length lectures to wade through – and use automated testing to check students’ understanding as they work through the content.
These MOOCS have been dubbed “xMOOCs”. Whilst they include discussion forums, and allow people to bounce ideas around and discuss learning together, the centre of the course is the instructor-guided lesson. Each student’s journey/trajectory through the course is linear and based on the absorption and understanding of fixed competencies. Learning is seen as something that can be tested and certified.
The other type of MOOC is based on connectivism. These are the cMOOCS.
The connected aspect of learning is brought to the fore in a cMOOC. It’s a chaotic experience (as @RosemarySewart put it) and is inherently personal and subjective, as participants create their meaning and build and navigate their own web of connections.
cMOOCs are not proscriptive, and participants set their own learning goals and type of engagement. They won’t necessarily walk away with a fixed and tested set of specific skills or competencies, or knowledge of a set body of content. This makes cMOOCs tricky to grade or assess or certify. This, combined with the fact that the platform is totally open, means that they probably aren’t very easy to make any money from.
So, I prefer xMOOCs but with the freedom of cMOOCs. Why, because I don't need to spend (waste) time wandering all over the Internet to gain my learning.
http://natnelson19.wordpress.com/2013/04/07/cmoocs-or-xmoocs-both-please/comment-page-1/#comment-144
xMOOCs also diverging...?
Armstrong, L. (2012). Coursera and MITx: Sustainingor disruptive?
http://www.changinghighereducation.com/2012/08/coursera-.html
accessed 2012-09-22
A bit harsh on the Cousera offering, what do you expect for free? Detailed human assessment and feedback - dream on pal. Maybe the people who take the Coursera courses aren't deeply into "working knowledge of research in pedagogy" perhaps they don't think it is all that important when compared to getting on with the free course. Armstrong comes across as an intellectual snob.
I don't see a HUGE difference between xMOOCs given here. Only a listed, somewhat biased, personal preference. The article states that MITx is better than Cousera because MIT mention the word "pedagogy" more often in their literature. Armstrong seems to hint that Coursera is the great pretender. A sort of "jumped up" "new money" learning platform.
Coursera (for profit) - provides a s/w platform for any university and course
Choose from 300+ courses in over 20 categories created by 62 Universities from 16 countries. With courses in French, Chinese, Italian, Spanish.
Only 1 from London and 1 from Edinburgh - So where is Oxbridge then? Nothing from Thailand.
The search engine on Coursera is very nice and fast. I think this is fantastic, wish it was available when I was a kid. I would have studied everything.
MITx - Is for MIT (changed now - see below.)
Udacity (for profit) - Same idea as Coursera
Courses have subtitles in Spanish, Chinese, French, Portuguese and even less widespread languages such as Croatian.
22 courses listed, topics tend to all be CS related. Information on where the courses come from is not clearly available. Perhaps the courses are created by freelancers not necessarily connected to any university.
EdX (non-profit) - MIT, Harvard, Berkeley (Berk - not mentioned in the About, but listed as providing courses) plus: edX’s newest consortium members include Wellesley, Georgetown, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, McGill University, University of Toronto, Australian National University, Delft University of Technology, and Rice University.
Open open-source s/w platform being developed
In theory, EdX picks and chooses which universities in wants, whereas Coursera will have anyone.
29 courses listed.
Opps forgot about Academic Earth! http://www.academicearth.org/
Surly one of the first?
Cambridge is here. 42 universities (a number from India)
A big list of "Climate change" related courses - 43. Because it's Academic "Earth".
Why is Academic Earth not mentioned as a MOOC?
Summary - Coursera has the most courses, choice and universities listed. EdX comes in second place, and says it is choosy in who it picks. Udacity doesn't seem to affiliate to any university but basically offers 22 courses on CS subjects only pretty much.
Where will the money come from? At the end of the Coursera partnership
agreement a section on Possible Company Monetization Strategies lists eight
potential business models. They are:
- Certification (students pay for a badge or certificate)
- Secure assessments (students pay to have their examinations invigilated (proctored))
- Employee recruitment (companies pay for access to student performance records)
- Applicant screening (employers/universities pay for access to records to screen applicants)
- Human tutoring or assignment marking (for which students pay)
- Selling the MOOC platform to enterprises to use in their own training courses
- Sponsorships (3rd party sponsors of courses)
- Tuition fees
Pearson VUE, a subsidiary of the Pearson conglomerate, to use its worldwide network of testing centres
http://www.pearsonvue.com/
Pearson VUE delivers certification and licensure tests through the world’s largest network of test centers in 175 countries across the world.
I believe online education in conjunction with independent test centers will be the future.
"Put another way, cMOOCs focus on knowledge creation and generation whereas xMOOCs focus on knowledge duplication'." I disagree, I think cMOOCs are for knowledge gain and xMOOCs for problem solving and critical thinking, for the CS field.
Google Course Builder and it's own xMOOC - Power Searching
http://www.powersearchingwithgoogle.com/
Course Builder - looks interesting and something I could probably do
the London School of Economics, Oxford, Yale and Stanford thought they could make useful additional income by offering non-credit courses online. In the event they and their partners lost money before ventures like Fathom and AllLearn were ignominiously shuttered.
http://allearn.org/ - What a nightmare of a site, no wonder if failed. Looks like it has been hacked or is a joke.
This is a much better paper compared to the other one. It's clear, doesn't indulge in eduspeak and contains good and meaningful links to follow up on. No sense of pretensions and language that can be understood. Good job!
Elite institutions, of course, usually define their quality by the numbers of applicants that they exclude, not by the teaching that happens on campus after admission. My late Athabasca University colleague Dan Coldeway called this the principle of 'good little piggies in, make good bacon out'.
Learning analytics are 'the use of data and models to predict student progress and performance, and the ability to act on that information'
The best MOOCs / universities will be the ones where measured value-added of incoming and exiting students is the greatest.
For over 30 years Athabasca University has offered a Bachelor's degree with no residency requirement (i.e. students do not have to take any courses from Athabasca, the award can be made entirely on the basis of credit accumulation). Athabasca is also contemplating putting together a 'Best First Year Online' constructed entirely from open courseware (Pannekoek, 2012).
Pannekoek, F. (2012). Best First Year Online: An Open Courseware Alternative.
http://president.athabascau.ca/documents/BestFirstYear.pdf accessed 2012-09-23
OERu - OERu
http://wikieducator.org/OER_university/Home
A few words but nothing solid in place. Looks like a dead duck to me.
Bates, T (2012). What's right and what's wrong about Coursera-style MOOCs?http://www.tonybates.ca/2012/08/05/whats-right-and-whats-wrong-about-coursera-style-moocs/
accessed 2012-09-22
TED Talks: Daphne Koller: What we’re learning from online education
Daphne Koller, one of the two founders of Coursera, describes some of the key features of the Coursera MOOCs, and the lessons she has learned to date about teaching and learning from these courses. The video is well worth watching, just for this.
If Stanford or MIT gave credit for these courses to students from South Africa who succeeded in the exams, and then awarded them full degrees, then that might be different. But these elite universities continue to treat MOOCs as a philanthropic form of continuing education, and until these institutions are willing to award credit and degrees for this type of program, we have to believe that they think that this is a second class form of education suitable only for the unwashed masses.
I proudly stand and declare myself as one of the Unwashed and indeed Unshaved also!
Having watched the Koller Ted Talk I think Bates is being a bit biased and negative. I don't think Koller stated or believes she has created MOOCs or Online leaning.
With luck the dream of the great American educator Ernie Boyer (1990) may even
come true. In 1990, in Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate,
he wrote: 'We need a climate in which colleges and universities are less
imitative, taking pride in their uniqueness. It's time to end the suffocating
practice in which colleges and universities measure themselves far too
frequently by external status rather than by values determined by their own
distinctive mission'.
Sir John Daniel Bio - http://sirjohn.ca/wordpress/?page_id=14
That was supposed to be a 1 hour activity, more like 1 day!
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