MOOC
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The year of no s**t Sherlock
With apologies for the potty mouth title. If you want a really good review of the year from an ed tech perspective then I suggest reading Audrey Watters' series of posts. One thing that I found myself doing repeatedly this year was staring open-mouthed at my screen as I read yet another 'discovery' or 'innovation' from US based silicon valley start-ups relating to education. It seems that if you want to be noticed then having no shame in pretending you have invented something is a real advantage. And journalists really do love a 'new and shiny' story. Here are some of my faves: The SPOC – don't want your MOOC to…
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Design responses to MOOC completion rates
Well, my previous post on data for MOOC completion rates caused a bit of a kerfuffle on Twitter. It was interpreted by some as saying "ONLY completion rates matter". And also of not taking into account other factors such as what learners who don't complete get from a MOOC. That seems rather like criticising Alien for not being a rom-com to my mind – they're doing different things. This research was showing one aspect with the quantitative data available. It is part of a bigger picture which ethnographic studies, surveys and more data analysis will complete. It wasn't attempting to be the full stop on MOOC research. Anyway, here is…
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Completion data for MOOCs
As I mentioned in the previous post, I am doing some Gates funded research on MOOCs. My part was learning design analysis, while Katy Jordan has been looking at factors influencing completion rates. All this work is Katy's, I take no credit for it. She would blog it, but is about to have her first baby any day now, and strangely that has taken priority over blogging about MOOCs, so she said I could blog it on her behalf. There will be a paper that details the full results and methodology, so I'm just giving some highlights here. Katy collected completion data from 221 different MOOCs. The range was limited…
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The Learning Design of MOOCs
I got some Gates funding for the MOOC Research Initiative to look at two things: completion data, and learning design MOOCs. The first part allowed Katy Jordan to finish the work she had started in mapping various factors from over 200 MOOCs that influence completion. You can see more of her work here, and I’ll blog on that later. My part has been using the tools we’ve developed at the OU for learning design, building on Grainne Conole’s work. We use two main tools: the Activity Planner and the Module Map. The first maps student activity across 6 categories, eg assimilative, productive, etc. This is a good way to think…
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The iceland of Dallas
<Dallas deathstar in the snow – this may, or may not, be a metaphor> I was at the MOOC research initiative conference in Dallas, Texas last week. As Jim and others have reported, we got caught in icemageddon, but that's a whole other (war) story. I'll be doing a few posts about the conference. It was a fantastic meeting, well done George Siemens, Amy Collier and Tanya Joosten for putting it together. I got to have some great conversations, and meet people I've know online for years. Which is by way of apology for my first post being a bit negative. This one concerns one aspect of the conference…
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Stop me if you think you’ve heard this one before
<Image http://www.flickr.com/photos/hanuman/1860273153/> No doubt most of you will have read the (unintentionally hilarious) interview with Udacity founder and the media's poster child for MOOCs, Sebastian Thrun. If you haven't the short version (minus the ego fanning and competitive cycling) is that Thrun has realised that not many people complete MOOCs, and that making them pay is a good incentiviser, so he's making Udacity an elearning corporate training company. And there it is. After all that hype. All that "Napsterisation of higher education", the "end of universities", the "10 global providers of education" nonsense, what do we have? A corporate elearning company. As TS Eliot observed, the world ends not with…
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What sort of open do you want?
<Image http://www.flickr.com/photos/42386632@N00/8528725328/ > I've been thinking about openness in education a lot recently (my plan is to write a book on this, more on that later). And I've slowly, probably years after everyone else, come to the conclusion that it's a mistake to talk about openness as if it's one thing. There may have been a time when it was, when all the forms of openness blended easily into one indistinguishable lump, but that's not the case now. Not only are there different aspects of openness, but I'm beginning to feel that some may be mutually exclusive with others, or at least prioritising some means less emphasis on others. What do…
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MOOCs as 1st year undergrad replacement
For top-secret research I am undertaking, I'm looking at a range of MOOCs, both xMOOCs, cMOOCs and flavours inbetween (although, definitely not ridiculous variations such as SPOCs). Here's some breaking news – they are all pretty good. Take away all the hype, commercial bubble and rabid arguments on both sides and you are left with some good teaching material. As I've been going through them (admittedly not as thoroughly as a student), I've begun to think that a mix of them would probably represent a good grounding in a topic, equivalent to a 1st year of an undergrad degree. It wouldn't teach some of the other skills you develop, I'll…
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Will killer robot dogs mean the end of universities?
The answer to this question is, probably no. But yet we don't see newspapers running articles about the potential threat of killer robot dogs to the status of universities. But we do see them about how MOOCs (sorry David) will destroy all higher education as we know it. For example here is a piece in Forbes. Or one from Nexttrends. Or one from Eduwire. Why does it always have to be the death of, the end of? I guess it's because 'Will MOOCs be a complementary part of a richer mix of educational offerings from universities?' isn't such a snappy title. I think we've been through the first wave of…
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FutureLearn & the role of MOOCs
If you're working in higher ed in the UK you will no doubt have seen that FutureLearn had its beta launch last week. Some disclosure – FutureLearn is owned by the OU & I've been partially involved in its development, so I'm probably not a completely objective commentator. Needless to say, what follows is just my opinion and not an official OU/FL one. The first thing to note about the FutureLearn launch is that it launched. This is no mean feat. To get all those partner universities to sign an agreement on something quite vague, to develop a platform from scratch and to get good quality courses created for a…
