open courses
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Hanging with the MOOC boys
Now that MOOCtober has passed, I think it's safe to talk about MOOCs again. As I've mentioned I'm experimenting next year with running my block of the Masters Course in Online and Distance Education as an open course. I've wanted to do this for ages, but always been blocked, but now that MOOCs are on everyone's radar, lots of elements have fallen into place that make it possible. This might be a beneficial consequence of the MOOC hype – they create an environment in which experimentation in open courses is encouraged. My course will run for 6 weeks and is part of the longer 20 week course, H817 Openness and…
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Does your MOOC have penguins?
It turns out that there are no less than three MOOCs on open education coming your way. George and Stephen are running one now, David Wiley's one ran last winter and will run again this winter. And very last, I'm running one next March. My one really arose through logic and not a desire to ape George or David (although I do that often enough). I was writing a block of the new Masters level course on Innovation in education, and my block was on open education. I have a strong 'learning by doing' approach, so it made sense for the students on this block to experience it as an…
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Amnesimooc
You can probably dismiss this post as 'stop being defensive', but I'll log it now while it occurs to me. As I mentioned in a previous post, the sudden interest in MOOCs from mainstream universities and the media is exciting, and has a number of benefits, but is not without its pitfalls. In the rush to fuel the MOOC hype it seems to me that some commentators have confused the possibility of running large scale (always the large scale gets them excited) open courses with running large scale online courses. The two are not synonymous. I believe it is the open element of MOOCs that is really intriguing – for…
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Give me an M!
<Image http://www.flickr.com/photos/bigblue/317855467/ by bigbluemeanie> The second of MOOC musing posts: On Twitter recently Alan Levine bemoaned that there was too much emphasis on the M in MOOCs, and I think it's the M that worries Jonathan Rees. Kate Bowles has a well reasoned post on some MOOC concerns also. I wonder if there is some truth in this – it is the manager’s dream of the infinite lecture hall that characterised early e-learning until people found out e-learning wasn’t very cheap in the end. But for a MOOC, learners aren’t paying so they can’t complain about the infinite lecture hall approach, but they will be monetised somehow (whether through accreditation, data,…
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MOOCs Inc
<Image http://www.flickr.com/photos/barenboime/2355747124/ by Barenboime> I thought I’d write a couple of posts around MOOCs, and in particular, the sudden awakening of senior management, media and companies to them. I don’t think this post is really saying much more than ‘hmm, interesting isn’t it?’. Having been involved on the periphery of MOOCs for a while, and knowing a lot of the real pioneers on first name terms (George, David, Stephen, Dave, Jim, Alec – see, I do know their first names), it’s been interesting to see the sudden adoption of MOOCs by others, most notably those in the US. What we have been witnessing is the mainstreaming of the original MOOC concept.…
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Bridge 2 Success
This is the third in the what I'm up to at the OU posts. A while back we were part of a consortium that won a bid in the Next Generation Learning Challenges funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Educause, & The Hewlett Foundation. The partners are us (IET at the OU), MIT, the Anne Arundel Community College and University of Maryland University College (UMUC) – the project is Bridge to Success. It's aim is to use OERs to help community college students who struggle with study skills, and math(s) in particular. So we've taken some OU courses and these have been adapted in the US, and made available through our OpenLearn labspace.…
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What are the values in a MOOC?
[MOOCs should be this kind of fun] So this week I am coordinating the topic over at George, Dave and Stephen's Change MOOC (you can see my activities here). The topic is, inevitably, digital scholarship. Preparing for it has set me thinking about what the educator and the learners get from MOOCs and how they differ from formal courses. At this point, ladies and gentlemen, I would like you to take out your violins – I have a very full workload. I know, you feel my pain. The trouble with this is that it means any of this MOOC stuff is really done at the fringes of my time. There's that…
