e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: MOOC

  • MOOC as Courseware: Coursera’s Big Announcement in Context

    Today’s big news is that Coursera, the largest of the MOOC providers, has signed with 10 public statewide systems. As described by Ry Rivard at Inside Higher Ed:

    Universities from New Mexico to New York will join Coursera in a sprawling expansion of the Silicon Valley startup’s efforts to take online education to the masses.

    Together, state systems and flagship universities in nine states will help the company test new business models and teaching methods and potentially put Coursera in competition with some of the ed tech industry’s most established players.

    The push, which company and university officials previewed over the past several days, is not a single effort but several pilot projects with different goals. Some university leaders are unsure of the direction they are heading in, but the effort will create at least a temporary buffet of experimentation using Coursera’s online platform. A network of universities will be creating or using and buying or selling course material from each other, with Coursera in the middle as a content broker, consultant and host.

    One key aspect of this announcement is Coursera’s full-fledged move into courseware as a new business line to complement their standalone courses. Courseware is the combination of “the curriculum, the course materials, the assessments and, in some cases, the analytics to track student progress and make study suggestions” as described in Michael’s post “MOOCs, Courseware, and the Course as an Artifact“. In essence, courseware is everything but the instructor and interactive discussion, certification and support. This is what is meant by “wrapping” around a MOOC.

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  • Harvard Faculty Request Faculty Oversight of HarvardX (Their Usage of edX)

    Yesterday, 58 faculty members from the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard wrote an open letter to the dean requesting faculty oversight of HarvardX. When schools sign up for edX, their implementations tend to be called SchoolX, thus HarvardX specifically refers to their usage of the MOOC platform, not to the overall edX organization. This distinction is important, given Harvard’s founding role in creating the edX organization and $30m pledge of support.

    The letter is short, so I’ll quote it in full (the signatures are much longer than the letter itself).

    As the university marks the first anniversary of edX and HarvardX, some faculty are tremendously excited about the potential of HarvardX; others are deeply concerned about the program’s costs and consequences. We appreciate the meetings, town halls, and other arenas in which faculty have been able to discuss HarvardX. But we believe that many critical questions about the relationship of the FAS to HarvardX, and to edX, have not yet been addressed. These questions (which fall outside the remit of the two existing HarvardX faculty committees, most of whose members are not from FAS) range from faculty oversight of HarvardX to the impact online courses will have on the higher education system as a whole.

    The Faculty of Arts and Sciences is directly responsible for the teaching of Harvard undergraduates and Ph.D. students. It is our responsibility to ensure that HarvardX is consistent with our commitment to our students on campus, and with our academic mission. Given the rapid pace of development of HarvardX, we believe it is essential to have a formal, sustained, and structured faculty discussion on these issues as soon as possible. We write to request that you appoint a committee of FAS ladder faculty to draft a set of ethical and educational principles that will govern FAS involvement in HarvardX, to be brought before the FAS for a vote in the coming academic year.

    Note that they request FAS ladder faculty, which means tenure and tenure track faculty and specifically not adjuncts and lecturers. It is possible, however, that the requested committee of ladder faculty could choose to involve adjuncts in the process.

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  • MOOCs Explained: Radio Interview with University of Delaware

    Just over a week ago I had the opportunity to participate in a radio interview for the University of Delaware’s local station WVUD, with the Campus Voices interview airing on May 17th. The interview was in advance of Delaware’s summer faculty institute, where I will be speaking in just over a week. I really enjoyed the interview, and this is an area that needs more attention – local educational technology support for faculty innovation, with an emphasis on faculty sharing best practices. The summer institute is May 28th – 31st.

    I was interviewed by Richard Gordon and Paul Hyde, and some of the key topics we explored:

    • Not everyone is a reader of the Chronicle of Higher Education – what the heck is a MOOC?
    • How do MOOCs affect faculty teaching in a bricks-and-mortar university?
    • What are the completion rates of MOOCs and what are the student types?
    • Are there applications beyond higher education?
    • Why is there such significant pushback against MOOCs lately?
    • What disciplines beyond science and engineering are using MOOCs?

    Here is link to the U Delaware radio interview – audio only. It’s about a half hour in length, but with some cool NPR-sounding music to kick it off.

    I have also added some graphics and created a video of the interview.

  • Big 3 MOOC Providers Turning One Year Old

    We are in the middle of the first anniversary of the creation of the big 3 MOOC providers (Coursera, Udacity, edX).

    • Sebastian Thrun announced the creation of Udacity on January 23, 2012 as described by Reuters.
    • Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng announced the creation of Coursera on April 18, 2012 in this NY Times article.
    • MIT and Harvard announced the creation of edX on May 2, 2012 in this MIT article.

    And what a year it’s been, especially in terms of the engagement of national media, university presidents and boards on the topic of MOOCs, online education and the future of higher education in general. I doubt there is a higher education conference this year that doesn’t mention MOOCs in one form or another.

    But one year is a seriously short time period for higher education and educational technology, which are just not used to changes on this time scale. To give some perspective, consider the following:

    • There are quite a few ed tech products that have been or will have been in beta or introductory mode for at least a year when fully released.
    • This time one year ago, few people outside of Virginia knew what a Rector or how a board of them might force a president to resign partially based on discussions about MOOCs.
    • Many LMS and almost all student information system / ERP selection processes (not even including implementation) take more than a year.

  • Open SUNY: A Game Changer in the Making

    Update 4/25 and bumped due to changes: Thanks to Greg Ketcham and Robert Knipe, I have replaced the 2009 interim proposal document with the updated advisory team report. This changes the intro blurb, description of 9 inter-dependent components, and list of contributions below.

    I have been surprised at how little interest the Open SUNY announcement last week generated in educational media and blog discussions. Perhaps the MOOC portion of the story, which was prominent in several headlines, caused people to assume this was just another school trying to jump on the bandwagon. What is significant, however, is that one of the largest statewide systems in the country is making a multi-pronged approach to reduce time-to-graduation and therefore lower student costs.

    In brief, Open SUNY is part of the system’s agenda to expand access to public higher education by leveraging existing programs or experiments already in place at member campuses or at the system level, and it has strong ties to Open Educational Resources (OER) concepts. The concept for the strategic plan originated in 2009, eventually leading to the report Getting Down to Business: Interim Report of the Chancellor’s Online Education Advisory Team released in December 2012 [updated].

    The Advisory Team recommends “Open SUNY” be officially adopted as the name of SUNY’s new online learning initiative. The term Open SUNY represents an opening up of the educational opportunities that SUNY can provide through the enhancement of existing—and development of new—online education resources, courses and degree programs.

    Open SUNY has the clear potential to establish SUNY as the preeminent and most extensive online learning environment in the nation by providing affordable, high quality, convenient, innovative, and flexible online education opportunities for the citizens of the State of New York and beyond. As a collaborative online educational network, the Open SUNY Online Consortium (SUNY campuses and SUNY system offices) will draw on the Power of SUNY to connect students with faculty and peers from across the state and throughout the world, and link them to the best in research-based online teaching and learning environments, practices, and resources. Dedicated to providing access to open and online learning opportunities, Open SUNY will connect learner and community needs and will allow the State University of New York to bring this concept to scale like no other college, university, or system in the United States.

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  • Insight on MOOC student types from ELI Focus Session

    Michael and I had the privilege of leading off the ELI Online Spring Focus Session on MOOCs (taking place today, Apr 3, and tomorrow). Thanks to Stephen Downes, we have a good set of notes on our presentation “Everything You Thought You Knew About MOOCs Could Be Wrong” (program & resources, notes) as well as the other sessions already on each of the sessions on his blog. You know, I think he actually believes this stuff about learner-generated content and self-forming communities . . .  In all seriousness, this is a great session by ELI, great notes by Stephen, and it’s instructive to see the various channels such as chat, Twitter, Google+, and blogs tied to the session (most using #elifocus).

    There was an interesting presentation from Seth Anderson (Duke), Amy Collier (Stanford), Cassandra Horlii (California Institute of Technology) titled “Designing and Implementing MOOCs that Maximize Student Learning” (program & resources, notes) that gives additional insight into MOOC student types. Quoting from Stephen’s notes:

    In most of the MOOCs Stanford has offered, fewer than half the students have come from North America. Nearly half the people in a MOOC may not have a knowledge of English as a first language. They have a more varied educational and cultural background than in traditional courses.

    The majority of active users say they’re taking the course for fun or a challenge, rather than a credential. The tendency to judge MOOCs based on completion rates overlooks the reasons why people join a MOOC. The majority engage in sampling behaviour – like the people in this webinar. Many are MOOC auditors, but they don’t engage, and they aren’t motivated by completion records.

    This is an important aspect of MOOCs and open courses in general that gets missed by popular media and even by some MOOC faculty. The students have varying goals and behavior within a course, and it is a mistake to assume they should converge on a common goal and set of behaviors.

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  • SUNY and the Expansion of Prior Learning Assessments

    Last week Steve Kolowich wrote in the Chronicle of Higher Education about the State University of New York (SUNY) system approval of a plan that would target reduced time-to-degree.

    The State University of New York’s Board of Trustees on Tuesday endorsed an ambitious vision for how SUNY might use prior-learning assessment, competency-based programs, and massive open online courses to help students finish their degrees in less time, for less money.

    The plan calls for “new and expanded online programs” that “include options for time-shortened degree completion.” In particular, the board proposed a huge expansion the prior-learning assessment programs offered by SUNY’s Empire State College.

    Although the MOOC angle led the article’s title and online discussion, there was more significant news in terms of structural change regarding Prior Learning Assessments (PLA).

    Even before the SUNY announcement, it had already been a big week for nontraditional models for awarding college credit. The U.S. Education Department on Monday said it had no problem with spending federal student aid on college programs that give credit based on “competency,” not the number of hours students spend in class.

    Empire State College’s prior-learning assessment programs operate on a similar principle. Students who can demonstrate that they have acquired certain skills can get college credit, even if they did not acquire those skills in a college classroom.

    The new SUNY effort will aim to copy the Empire State model across the system, said Nancy L. Zimpher, the chancellor.

    “This resolution opens the door to assurances to our students that this kind of prior-learning assessment will be available eventually on all our campuses,” said Ms. Zimpher in an interview.

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