e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Author: Phil Hill

  • Proposed California Legislation for Statewide Online Education Courses – The Basics

    Outside of the Vatican, the big news this week in higher education is the proposed legislation in California that would identify and approve a set of up to 50 online courses that the three public systems would accept as credit for admitted students. Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg is co-authoring SB520 that addresses popular, introductory courses for which students cannot get access from their University of California, California State University, or California Community College campus. The pre-coverage of the event included the following:

    As described in the NY Times:

    Legislation will be introduced in the California Senate on Wednesday that could reshape higher education by requiring the state’s public colleges and universities to give credit for faculty-approved online courses taken by students unable to register for oversubscribed classes on campus.

    If it passes, as seems likely, it would be the first time that state legislators have instructed public universities to grant credit for courses that were not their own — including those taught by a private vendor, not by a college or university.

    “We want to be the first state in the nation to make this promise: No college student in California will be denied the right to move through their education because they couldn’t get a seat in the course they needed,” said Darrell Steinberg, the president pro tem of the Senate, who will introduce the bill. “That’s the motivation for this.”

    Update 3/14: Text of bill here

    Senate President Pro Tem Steinberg held a press conference today via Google Hangout and video streaming (archive available soon on site) to announce the package of legislation. I have attempted to summarize the press conference below (any mistakes in note-taking are my own, and I’ll update as needed). While Michael and I will both have analysis of this proposal soon, I wanted to first share the information directly.

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  • Emerging Student Patterns in MOOCs: A (Revised) Graphical View

    In part 1 of this series of posts on MOOC student patterns, I shared an initial description of four student patterns emerging from Coursera-style MOOCs based on new data from professors. In part 2, I revised the description based on some feedback and added a graphical view. The excellent feedback has continued, primarily through comments to both posts mentioned above as well as a separate Google+ discussion. This process has helped identify a fifth pattern, clarify the pattern description, and improve the associated graphic. In particular, I want to thank Debbie Morrison, Colin Milligan, John Whitmer, Charles Severance and Kevin Kelly – as well as other commenters for the great discussion.

    The primary changes involve clarifying the previously-described Lurker category. I have separated out a new No-Show category and renamed the Lurkers as Observers. There are also tighter descriptions of each pattern that help define potential data collection that would identify these groupings. Here are the new descriptions and updated graphic.

    No-Shows – These students appear to be the largest group of those registering for an Coursera-style MOOC, where people register but never login to the course while it is active.

    Observers – These students login and may read content or browse discussions, but do not take any form of assessment beyond pop-up quizzes embedded in videos.

    Drop-Ins – These are students who perform some activity (watch videos, browse or participate in discussion forum) for a select topic within the course, but do not attempt to complete the entire course. Some of these students are focused participants who use MOOCs informally to find content that help them meet course goals elsewhere.

    Passive Participants – These are students who view a course as content to consume. They may watch videos, take quizzes, read discuss forums, but generally do not engage with the assignments.

    Active Participants – These are the students who fully intend to participate in the MOOC and take part in discussion forums, the majority of assignments and all quizzes & assessments.

    studentPatternsInMoocs3-2

     

  • Emerging Student Patterns in MOOCs: A Graphical View

    Update (3/10): Patterns and descriptions have been updated based on feedback in a new post. Added links to Astronomy, AI Planning courses.

    Thanks to feedback from my last post, I have modified the proposed description of patterns for students engaged in MOOCs. I also want to introduce a graphic to visually represent these patterns.

    studentPatternsInMoocs2

    • I have removed the language comparing passive participants to traditional students based on the idea that they expect others to define academic goals for them and ‘expect to be taught’ (thanks to Colin Milligan for description). While this distinction between passive and active participants is important, I have removed the direct reference to traditional students – the reader can apply their own comparisons.
    • I have removed the usage of the term archetype. As Satia Renee put it so well on Google+, archetype implies “more an internal personality type expressing itself in patterns of behavior” when I am trying to capture the patterns of behavior. Thus I’m sticking with the less loaded term of patterns.
    • I have added language, thanks to Kevin Kelly, that captures the growing case of Drop-Ins as students focused on a particular topic within a MOOC for usage outside of that MOOC.
    • Finally, I have moved Drop-Ins right after Lurkers based on Colin’s comments and to help with the graphical view below.

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  • The Four Student Archetypes Emerging in MOOCs

    The Four Student Archetypes Emerging in MOOCs

    Update (3/10): Patterns and descriptions have been updated based on feedback in a new post.

    As discussed in my last post, the focus on “completion rates” in MOOCs is somewhat misplaced, as open education is not simply an extension of traditional education. As several others have noted, not every student is attempting to complete a course, and in fact different students have different goals while participating in the same open course. This holds true for both cMOOCs and xMOOCs.

    Does this mean that we should throw out the completion rate data? No. As Katy Jordan described quite well in the comments:

    A lot of people have asked whether completion rates are the right way of framing the success of a MOOC; I agree that there is much more to the potential positive impacts of MOOCs for students than completion rate but, at the moment, completion rate is what the providers are measuring most consistently.

    In my mind, we should augment the models we use to evaluate MOOCs rather than throw the baby out with the bathwater. The challenge, therefore, is to move beyond the simplistic view of one type of student with one type of goal (course completion), and find patterns of student behavior that will give additional insight into the different goals and therefore different measures we should have in evaluating whether MOOCs are effective.

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  • The Most Thorough Summary (to date) of MOOC Completion Rates

    How many times have you heard the statement that ‘MOOCs have a completion rate of 10%’ or ‘MOOCs have a completion rate of less than 10%’? The meme seems to have developed a life of its own, but try to research the original claim and you might find a bunch of circular references or anecdotes of one or two courses. Will the 10% meme hold up once we get more data?

    While researching this question for an upcoming post, I found an excellent resource put together by Katy Jordan, a graduate student at The Open University of the UK. In a blog post from Feb 13, 2013, Katy described a new effort of hers to synthesize MOOC completion rate data – from xMOOCs in particular and mostly from Coursera.

    Via a combination of thinking about ‘what makes a successful MOOC?’, and looking for a topic for my final project on the Infographics MOOC, I decided to try to pull together the various statistics floating around online about MOOC completion rates. I’m trying to see if any differences emerge on the basis of platform or the assessment methods used.

    My draft graph synthesising everything I’ve found so far can be found here: http://www.katyjordan.com/MOOCproject.html

    What Katy has done so far is compile completion rate data from 24 MOOCs – 19 from Coursera, 3 from edX, 1 from Udacity and 1 from MITx (a precursor to edX). The data is available in a table format or in a graph.

    table

     

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  • Snapshot of LMS Market for Large Online Programs in the US

    The transformation of the higher education LMS market continues, and I expect more changes over the next 2 – 3 years. However, it seems time to capture a key segment of the market based on two recent announcements that directly impact large online programs.

    UMUC Selects Desire2Learn

    Following a multi-year strategic study and product selection, the University of Maryland University College (UMUC) selected Desire2Learn to replace the homegrown WebTycho LMS in use for over a decade. While there has been no press release, there are now official documents publicly available that describe this effort. Per the Faculty Advisory Committee (FAC) Newsletter:

    As announced last year, UMUC is planning to replace WebTycho with another learning management system. After a great deal of questions for the vendors, references checks and tests of functionality, Desire2Learn was chosen. More than 200 faculty, staff and students worldwide were part of the decision which was reported to have been by an overwhelming majority. The roll out will occur gradually over the next year or two. [snip]

    Not only is UMUC moving away from the WebTycho platform to the Desire2Learn (D2L) learning management system, but additional changes are in the works which will transform the online learning experience for our students and faculty.

    UMUC is part of the University of Maryland system, and it has a global focus – serving over 90,000 students worldwide.

    Mississippi Community Colleges Select Canvas

    The Mississippi Virtual Community College (MSVCC) provides the LMS for the system’s online program as well as for all 15 campuses. After a 6-month RFP process, MSVCC will be migrating from Blackboard Learn and Desire2Learn and implementing Canvas as the new LMS. From the press release:

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  • The Most Thorough Description (to date) of University Experience with MOOC

    One of the benefits of participating in an interactive event, such as the recent ELI Webinar that Michael and I led yesterday, is that the learning goes both ways. During the webinar, one of the participants shared a link for a report from Duke University on their first MOOC, Bioelectricity: A Quantitative Approach, delivered through Coursera in fall 2012. And what a find that was – this is the most thorough description I have yet seen from a university about their experience selecting, development, delivering and analyzing a MOOC. Kudos to Yvonne Belanger and Jessica Thornton, the authors.

    What follows are some key excerpts along with some observations, but for anyone considering participation in one of the xMOOCs – read the whole report.

    Some of the key findings from the executive summary:

    • Over 600 hours of effort were required to build and deliver the course, including more than 420 hours of effort by the instructor.
    • The course launched on schedule and was successfully completed by hundreds of students. Many hundreds more continued to participate in other ways. The number of students actively participating plateaued at around 1000 per week.
    • Over 12,000 students enrolled, representing more than 100 countries. Approximately 8,000 of these students logged in during the first week.
    • At the time of enrollment, one-third of enrolled students held less than a four year degree, one third held a Bachelors or equivalent, and one-third held an advanced degree.
    • 25% of students who took both Week 1 quizzes successfully completed the course, including 313 students from at least 37 countries. Course completers typically held a Bachelor’s degree or higher; however, at least 10 pre-college students were among those who successfully completed this challenging upper level undergraduate course.
    • Students who did not complete all requirements cited a lack of time, insufficient math background or having intended to only view the lectures from the outset. Regardless of completion status, many students were primarily seeking enjoyment or educational enrichment.
    • Most students reported a positive learning experience and rated the course highly, including ones who did not complete all requirements.
    • The Coursera platform met the needs of the course in spite of being continuously under development while the course was live. Technical issues reported by the students and instructor were generally minor, of short duration and/or quickly resolved.
Patience, flexibility and resilience on the part of instructor, Coursera students, CIT staff, and Duke University Office of Information Technology media services staff were key elements in the success of this course.

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