e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: MOOC Research Initiative

  • The Quotable Justin Reich: MOOC research needs to reboot

    Thanks to Audrey Watters I just read a new article in Science Magazine and publicly posted here by Justin Reich, the lead researcher for HarvardX (Harvard’s implementation of edX and associated research team) ((Note that Science Magazine access requires a subscription or purchase or individual article.)). Justin calls out the limitations of current MOOC research that focuses on A/B testing and engagement instead of learning, single-course context, and post hoc analysis with proper course design. While praising the field for making available cleansed data for any type of analysis, his core argument is that we need new approaches that cannot be solved just by research teams.
    Update: Added link to publicly-available DOCX article.

    While the whole article is worth reading, there are quite a few insightful quotes should get past the journal paywall.

    • Big data sets do not, by virtue of their size, inherently possess answers to interesting questions.
    • We have terabytes of data about what students clicked and very little understanding of what changed in their heads.
    • It does not require trillions of event logs to demonstrate that effort is correlated with achievement.

    (more…)

  • Upcoming EDUCAUSE Webinars on Dec 4th and Dec 8th

    Michael and I will be participating in two upcoming EDUCAUSE webinars.

    Massive and Open: A Flipped Webinar about What We Are Learning

    On Thursday, December 4th from 1:00–2:00 p.m. ET we will be joined by George Siemens for an EDUCAUSE Live! webinar:

    In 2012, MOOCs burst into public consciousness with course rosters large enough to fill a stadium and grand promises that they would disrupt higher education. Two years later, after some disappointments, setbacks, and not a small amount of schadenfreude, MOOCs seem almost passé. And yet, away from the sound and the fury, researchers and teachers have been busy finding answers to some basic questions: What are MOOCs good for, and what can we learn from them? Phil Hill and Michael Feldstein will talk about what we’re learning so far. (more…)

  • e-Literate TV Interviews from MRI13 Now Available

    In December 2013 Michael I attended the MOOC Research Initiative Conference (aka #MRI13 or “The greatest MOOC conference in the history of MOOCs”). Thanks to a grant funded by the Gates Foundation through Athabasca University, we are creating three episodes of an upcoming e-Literate TV series based on the conference. We expect to release these episodes in March.

    MRI

    As part of developing material for the episodes, we interviewed a number of research grantees and ed tech luminaries. We had some great guests who spoke about what we have learned from MOOCs, what the potential applications are, what the downsides are, and where open education could and should go in the future. It was a unique opportunity to get so many well-informed people in one place on a common topic.

    Today we releasing these videos through the e-Literate TV YouTube channel. These videos all carry a Creative Commons license to facilitate sharing and repurposing of the material.

    (more…)

  • About those U Penn MOOC results reported at MRI13

    Michael and I have been at the MOOC Research Initiative conference in Arlington, TX (#mri13) for the past three days. Actually, thanks to the ice storm it turns out MRI is the Hotel California of conferences.

    13th_Floor_-_Hotel_California

    credit: Bailey Carter assignment for Laura Gibbs’ class

    While I’m waiting to find out which fine Texas hotel dinner I might enjoy tonight, I thought it would be worthwhile to share more information from the University of Pennsylvania research that seems to be the focus of media reports on the conference (see Chronicle, Inside Higher Ed, and eCampusNews, for example). Penn has tracked approximately one million students through their 17 first-generation MOOCs on Coursera, which provided the foundation for this research.

    Per IHE:

    “Emerging data … show that massive open online courses (MOOCs) have relatively few active users, that user ‘engagement’ falls off dramatically especially after the first 1-2 weeks of a course, and that few users persist to the course end,” a summary of the study reads.

    For anyone who has paid even the slightest bit of attention to the MOOC space over the past year, those conclusions hardly qualify as revelations. Yet some presenters said they felt the first day of the conference served as an opportunity to confirm some of those commonly held beliefs about MOOCs.

    While it is accurate that these basic observations have been made in the past, there was some additional information from U Penn worth considering. The following slide images are courtesy of Laura Perna, a member of the research team.

    (more…)