Social Learning - MOOC - OER

Mientras en nuestro contexto todavía sigue vive el debate sobre los anglicismos, sobre si sería o no mejor el término Ludificación, una mirada a un futuro no demasiado lejano indica que lo de la Gamificación será una técnica de motivación más. Estará incorporada al diseño de cualquier plataforma, red social, cualquier espacio que requiera de la participación voluntaria de un individuo conectado saturado de posibilidades y entornos para la misma.

La gamificación estará incluso, como apuntábamos en Socionomía y en Jóvenes en la era de la hiperconectividad, entre los matices culturales que se exportan desde la web a la ya Sociedad postdigital: las generaciones actuales ya no confunden lo divertido con poco serio, abriendo un nuevo abanico de posibilidades para su motivación que no debemos dejar escapar. La vida es un viaje, nos dicen en el video, que queremos pasar de la mejor forma posible. Se rompen las antiguas éticas del catolicismo, se quiebra la culura del esfuerzo: si podemos inventar realidades más fáciles, más placenteras, más divertidas, vale la pena intentarlo.

Un informe reciente de Gartner resume muy bien lo que viene en este ámbito en las varias áreas en las que podemos aplicarlo:

For all the efforts underway to make Massive Open Online Courses a major part of American higher education, only a few initiatives have targeted community colleges as a venue for them to reach and educate students.

In a webinar titled “MOOCs and the Completion Agenda: Lessons in Learning, Assessment and Application,” two California-based community college leaders offered unique visions on how MOOCs could help two-year institutions improve student learning experiences. The American Council on Education organized the webinar on Wednesday, which included Dr. Daphne Koller, the co-founder of the MOOC-platform giant Coursera.

The University of Washington is growing its presence in the world of online course offerings by joining with edX, a course platform pioneered by Harvard and MIT.

Georgia Tech University and Udacity are making waves in higher education with the announcement of a $7,000 master’s degree in computer science. Previously as much as $40,000, the courses for the degree will be massive but not entirely open. Udacity has offered classes for free in the past but has not been able to offer degrees to students. The company’s monetization efforts, along with Georgia Tech’s partnership, make this initiative a landmark for education, according to Troy Onink of Forbes.

This is the kind of disruption that the higher education industry has been expecting and experimenting with using massively open online courses (MOOCs) for free that do not lead to a degree. Georgia Tech and Udacity made a bold move with this announcement. They changed the game by offering a sought after graduate degree through online instruction for 80% less than what the existing classroom curriculum costs, and employers are waiting for such graduates with good paying jobs.

Anant Agarwal, president of Edx, argues both sides of the debate on whether online courses will shrink the achievement gap among students seeking a higher ed...

Last year I looked at the impact of Massive Online Open Courses and other forms of online learning were having on learning in the workplace.

So it's interesting to read that software giant SAP are to launch their own MOOC style platform.

The site, called Open.SAP.com, aims to offer employees and other people interested in the SAP environment, a range of courses on topics that the company believe are key to success in the SAP world.

La filosofía de la Web 2.0 y la eclosión de las redes sociales y las plataformas virtuales (LMS) orientadas al e-Learning, han posibilitado el auge de algunas corrientes pedagógicas renovadoras, de entre las cuales destacaría tres:

Many Open Education Resources (OER) have been introduced by governments, universities, and individuals within the past few years. OERs provide teaching and learning materials that are freely available and offered online for anyone to use. Whether you’re an instructor, student, or self-learner, you have access to full courses, modules, syllabi, lectures, assignments, quizzes, activities, games, simulations, and tools to create these components.

While some OERs include OpenCourseWare (OCW) or other educational materials, they may also offer the means to alter those courses through editing, adding to those courses through publication, and the ability to shape the tools that share those resources. Additionally, they may maintain forums or other platforms where individuals can collaborate on building educational tools and documentation and the reach for those materials.

Massive open online courses, MOOCs, have become increasingly popular since they joined the elearning scene over a year ago. Academic libraries seem to have a good grip on the concept, but public librarians are having a harder time catching on to the benefits and challenges of the free, no-credit courses.To begin integrating the MOOCs into everyday life and making them more accessible, knowing what exactly an MOOC is and what it does is important. MOOCs originally were established courses offered by the most popular mass open online course providers so far are Coursera, EdX, and Udacity. The idea is to allow people of all ages the opportunity to learn higher education without spending the time or money needed to obtain a degree. This supports the autodidacticism of learning, or self learning.

Gone are the days when teachers and students cannot be “on the same page.” Today, they are most likely to be on the same Facebook page.

Maricar Francia, a  teacher at Los Baños National High School, found herself playing Facebook and online games to get her students’ attention.

“I was curious. I wanted to know why students were so fond of these things. Instead of doing their homework, they would go online,” said Francia, one of around 250 teachers who attended the recent digital education conference at PNU.

Instead of scolding her students, she sought a way to bring social media into the classroom.

Read more: http://newsinfo.inquirer.net/423997/the-many-creative-uses-of-social-media-in-learning#ixzz2VwmoFilb ;
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Coursera has unleashed a bucket of awesome on the edtech crowd with a new Teacher Professional Development section. Here are some of the great new classes!

We don't know whether massive online open courses (MOOCs) will be more than a fad in higher education -- but they're inspiring other kinds of organizations to create MOOCs of their own.

Aquent, a staffing firm that links companies with contractors, is opening its own MOOC, the Aquent Gymnasium, in June. Aquent mainly serves marketing, creative and digital firms, which see frequent changes in staffing needs as new technologies such as mobile platforms emerge.

In Daphne Koller’s TED talk about Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), she discusses what she believes are the pedagogical foundations of MOOCs. For her, and also restated on the Coursera website (the company she helped found), those foundations include the effectiveness of online learning, mastery learning, peer assessments and active learning.

Of course the evidence cited to support these foundations is scant and is quoted without giving any context to the research. MOOC critics also rarely produce any actual evidence when dismissing MOOCs as being pedagogically unsound or when stating that they offer a worse experience than face-to-face education on campus.

Read more: http://www.businessspectator.com.au/article/2013/5/27/technology/teaching-and-learning-foundations-moocs#ixzz2UcwBv08Q

Fifty-eight faculty members have called for Harvard University to create a new faculty committee to consider ethical issues related to edX, the entity created by the university and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to provide massive open online courses.

The letter urges the creation of the committee to consider "critical questions" about edX and its impact on Harvard and also on "the higher education system as a whole." And the letter calls for the new committee -- unlike two faculty panels that now exist -- to come entirely from the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. That faculty, which has primary responsibility not only for teaching undergraduates but also for training Ph.D.s in a wide range of disciplines, is the largest at the university. The letter was sent Thursday and published Friday by The Harvard Crimson.

Read more: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/05/28/harvard-professors-demand-greater-role-oversight-edx#ixzz2UcvEYsZW ;
Inside Higher Ed

Panelists talked about the impact of online teaching on higher education, focusing on massive, open online courses (MOOCS).

Dave Cormier is an educational activist, researcher, online community advocate and the Manager of Web Communications and Innovations at the University of Prince Edward Island. He has published on open education, Rhizomatic Learning, MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses), Digital Identity, and practical classroom uses of virtual worlds.

His educational journey started in 1998 teaching little children to speak English. The pivotal moment of his career happened when he was teaching at Hannam University in South Korea in 2003 surrounded by the papers of 275 writing students and wondering if he had them all.

That winter he started using discussion forums to bring all of his students together in a writing community (and to digitally keep track of their work) and he hasn’t looked back. He’s since helped organize online communities of teachers, spoken at events around the world and worked to understand how internet changes what it means to know. His educational exploration partners have included faculty and researchers from well-known universities, and lone teachers in small town classrooms. Some of them are even still talking to him.

Dave’s keynotes in the last couple of years have centred around how coming to know is a messy, imprecise process at once intensely individual and necessarily embedded in a community – Rhizomatic Learning. You can follow him on twitter at http://twitter.com/davecormier or follow his thoughts athttp://davecormier.com

Massive Open Online Courses are the hot topic in distance education, not only because the 2013 Horizon Report named MOOCs as one of the emerging technologies to have an effect on higher education, but also because many institutions offer them now.

However, when most people hear about MOOCs, they think of the “big three” providers — Coursera, Udacity and edX (Havardx and MITx), all of them American platforms. Most people are not aware that the first MOOCs were developed by Canadian teachers, George Siemens and Stephen Downes. Nor do most people know that many more MOOCs are available from around the world.

Read more: http://moocnewsandreviews.com/mooc-around-the-world-our-global-list-of-distance-education-resources-part-1/#ixzz2Ub1JHMUI ;
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EDX, the year-old Harvard-MIT online-learning venture, announced that 15 new institutions have become partners, increasing the number of participating universities and colleges to 27. The expansion is particularly pronounced among international universities, especially those in Asia, where enrollments in existing edX courses indicate significant student demand. The new affiliates also include a specialty school in the United States; a second U.S. college (alongside Wellesley)—an important aim for edX,after the Amherst faculty’s recent vote not to participate in edX; and three U.S. universities (among them, Cornell, following Yale’s decision last week to begin offering courses experimentally on the for-profit Coursera platform).

Udacity, one of the pioneers of the MOOC (massively open online course) movement,announced last week that it would offer a fully-accredited MOOC master’s degree in partnership with Georgia Tech and AT&T. The MS in Computer Science will cost no more than $7,000, and be open to anyone who meets entrance requirements. This partnership is the strongest signal to date that MOOCs will make quality higher-education more accessible than ever before.