e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: Massive open online course

  • MOOCs, Courseware, and the Course as an Artifact

    As Phil mentioned in his last post, he and I had the privilege of participating in a two-day ELI webinar on MOOCs. A majority of the speakers had been involved in implementing MOOCs at their institutions in one way or another. And an interesting thing happened. Over the course of the two days, almost none of the presenters—with the exception of the ACE representative, who has a vested interest—expressed the belief that MOOCs provide equivalent learning experiences to traditional college courses. Keep in mind, these folks were believers. They were enthusiastic about MOOCs in general. But they tended to describe the value of MOOCs as reaching a different audience than the traditional matriculated college student and provide a different value. They talked about it extending the university mission. By and large, they did not talk about it as being an improvement on, or even equal to, a traditional class. Now, there were well over 400 participants, so it wouldn’t be fair of me to say that there was unanimity, about this point or any other. But the level of agreement was remarkable.

    On the other hand, there was widespread enthusiasm for using MOOCs as essentially substitutions for textbooks in classes that included instructors from the local campus. Vanderbilt created what they called a course “wrapper” around a Coursera MOOC on machine learning. Folks from Stanford talked about the notion of a “distributed flip,” i.e., a group of flipped classrooms participating together in a MOOC. And SJSU talked about using an edX course in a blended course environment on one hand, and a Udacity course with Udacity-provided “course mentors” on the other.

    The obvious conclusion is that MOOCs are more of a threat to textbook companies than they are to universities. I think that’s true, but I also think it’s an oversimplification. There is a deeper (and older) trend to boil down a course into a set of digital artifacts that can be “played” by the student at will. It’s worth taking a deeper look at that trend, where it’s going, what’s useful about it, and what’s pernicious about it. (more…)

  • California SB 520 Currently Misses the Mark, but Not By Much

    Phil has done a great job of covering the news of California’s new bill (or stub of a bill, really) that would create a state-wide system of third-party online courses that would be available to students who would otherwise be shut out of courses that they need to graduate. It’s a good problem to tackle, since it would both make life better for students and improve the long-term state budget situation. Unfortunately, I don’t think the current incarnation of the bill takes into account either the full context and needs of students who find themselves shut out of the core courses or the directions that MOOCs are evolving into. As a result, it offers a bad prescription for the solution. The good news is that the shortcomings can be fixed while remaining well within the spirit of the bill.

    (more…)

  • The OpenClass Vision: An Example

    In my last post, I described a vision for combining elements of MOOC-like scale with a more traditional face-to-face classroom experience, as articulated by Pearson’s Adrian Sannier. (Full disclosure: Pearson is a client of MindWires Consulting.) A couple of months ago, I suggested in an interview with Josh Kim for Inside Higher Education that this is where MOOCs would go next:

    Question 6. Will MOOCs replace accredited curriculum? Why or why not?

    I don’t know how to answer this question, because I’m not convinced that we know what a MOOC is yet. Will there be massive elements that are integral to many curricula? Almost certainly, although I don’t know how much of it we will see in 2013. Will the curricula be all massive? Probably not in most cases. Will we consider the mix of massive and non-massive elements to be “MOOCs”? I don’t know.

    The problem that we have right now is that we have very few models for how this might work. So when Sannier mentioned a course called Habitable Worlds being developed by Professor Ariel Anbar and Lev Horodyskyj at Arizona State University that will eventually be brought to OpenClass to support this model, I asked to speak with Professor Anbar in order to get some specifics. The conversation shed some light not only on possibilities for the mixed model, but also on possible futures for the liberal arts and the role of the professor.

    (more…)

  • OpenClass vs the MOOC

    When Pearson’s OpenClass was announced about a year and a half ago, the natural question to ask was whether it would disrupt the LMS market. But that was then and this is now. (Full disclosure: Pearson is a client of MindWires Consulting.) The more interesting question today is where OpenClass stands vis-à-vis the MOOCs. To begin with, it certainly appears that the LMS and MOOC markets may be on a collision course. But beyond that, Pearson is a content provider first and foremost. With both the content and the platform at their disposal, as well as an array of assessment tools, they certainly have all the raw materials to build MOOCs. Is that where OpenClass is going? I recently had a short conversation with Pearson’s SVP of Product, Adrian Sannier, to find out. And the answer appears to be, “Not exactly.”

    (more…)

  • Apollo Group’s Technology Investments

    I had an unexpected opportunity to chat with the Apollo Group’s Rob Wrubel last week. Rob is their Chief Innovation Officers and Executive Vice President. It was a short conversation—only fifteen minutes—but boy, was it dense with information.

    (more…)

  • Why Big Data (Mostly) Can’t Help Improve Teaching

    Here’s a nifty video summary of a doctoral dissertation by Derek Muller that a client pointed out to me:

    The basic gist is that students have pre-conceived notions that are wrong, and it is very hard to dislodge those mistaken notions. If you show them a video with an accurate explanation, the students will say that the video was clear and helpful, but they will misremember it as confirming their (mistaken) preconceived notions. In short, they won’t learn. In contrast, if you show them a video that starts by directly stating and then refuting their misconception, they like the video less and say it is confusing, but they actually learn more. This is a really important pedagogical point to know whether you are giving traditional in-class lectures, writing curricular materials, or creating one of those oh-so-modern video lectures that all the cool kids are into these days.

    It’s also a good example of the kind of insight that big data is completely blind to. And it gives us good reason to be skeptical that taking large lecture courses online, turning them into REALLY large lecture courses (with nice videos), and expecting that new and more effective pedagogies will rise out of the data because, you know, science or something, is more of a hope (or a fantasy) than a plan to improve education.

    (more…)

  • Where xMOOCs and Adaptive Analytics Both Fail (For Now)

    No, this isn’t just an attempt to cram as many sexy keywords into one post title as possible. xMOOCs and adaptive analytics share an ambition: They both are at least partially motivated by a desire to teach at scale. With MOOCs, the goal is obvious. With adaptive analytics, less so, partly because there are multiple motivations and maybe because the desire for scale is not something that is polite to talk about due to a certain amount of discomfort with it. But the motivation is definitely there if you look closely, as I’ll get into in a bit.

    The problem is that both of these approaches, in their current incarnations, miss one absolutely critical element of the teaching process. As you can probably guess from all the qualifiers I am using in my language, I don’t think it’s an inherent or permanent failing. But I worry that it’s a failing due to a deep cultural blind spot that we have about what education is, and that it therefore will be challenging to address.

    (more…)