Based on Jon Udell’s excellent post, I spent the weekend getting reacquainted with work of Eric von Hippel, the researcher who pioneered the study of user-driven innovation. What’s interesting about von Hippel is that his research hits on the common themes of the open education movement, but does so in a slightly different key. Briefly, there are […]
MOOC
Combining MOOC Student Patterns Graphic with Stanford Analysis
In part 1, part 2, and part 3 of this series of posts on MOOC student patterns, I shared a description of five student patterns emerging from open-enrollment MOOCs (excluding those with an associated student fee) based on anecdotal data. In part 4 I compared the overall course completion pattern against an MIT study of the first edX […]
Two MOOC curriculum announcements in one week
In two apparently unrelated announcements, both MIT and Wharton announced they were moving beyond just courses and putting significant parts of their curriculum into MOOC platforms, both with identity verification. MIT is putting several undergraduate sequences online through MITx (their implementation of edX), while Wharton business school is putting a “foundation series” of first-year courses […]
MOOC Discussion Forums: barrier to engagement?
Robert McGuire wrote an article for Campus Technology, Building a Sense of Community in MOOCs, that touches on an important topic – is the centralized discussion forum a barrier to student engagement? But more students can also mean more isolation within the crowd. “Online classes can be really lonely places for students if they don’t feel […]
What Blackboard, Desire2Learn, and Udacity Should Learn from SJSU
As Phil noted in his analysisof the SJSU report, one of the main messages of the report seems to be that some of what we already know about performance and critical success factors for more traditional online courses also seem to apply to xMOOCs. But how good is the ed tech industry at taking advantage […]
SJSU research report confirms MOOCs are online courses
By reading the SJSU research report (download actual report here), one item that really hits me is that however different the scaling model is for MOOCs, they are still online courses and have similar success factors. I am not trying to minimize the value of the report by the title of this post, because there is […]
SJSU releases NSF-funded research report on Udacity pilot
Back in late July we found out that San Jose State University was pausing their SJSU Plus pilot program using Udacity for-credit MOOCs due to low passing rates. While there was fairly extensive media coverage of the story broken by Inside Higher Ed, there was the promise of a National Science Foundation (NSF) funded research […]