Networked Learning - MOOCs and more
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Experiences from Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) and how the MOOC could potentially increase diversity, social inclusion & learner engagement | Mark Morley

"There is currently much interest and excitement at the emergence of an educational approach commonly termed the ‘Massive Open Online Course’ or MOOC. ... I feel there is much we can learn from the delivery of MOOCs that can be used to enhance the on-campus experience supplemented by online course material and delivery. This format offers us the opportunity to investigate learning and improve teaching processes, perhaps more similar to the edX approach. It would seem appropriate to collect and use data to inform this process; treating learning and teaching as a field ripe for research, tying in to a research-led approach."

Peter B. Sloep's insight:

This is the single, most compehensive resource on MOOCs that I have come across yet. It discusses the history of MOOCs and describes Mark's personal experience with a number of them (both the c- and x- variety). Although it is a personal account, particularly the latter part, there is much value in learning the opinions of someone who 'has walked the walk' and not just 'talked the talk'. Anybody who wants to form an opinion on MOOCs - whether administrator, teacher of regular courses, teacher aspiring to teach a MOOC, or student in the widest sense of the word - can find something valuable here. Highly recommended! (@pbsloep)

Rose Heaney's curator insight, January 12, 6:30 AM

comprehensive indeed - author has participated in a lot of moocs. Very readable intro for those who have never heard of moocs

Patricia Daniels's curator insight, January 13, 9:17 AM

Interesting and detailed personal insight into cMOOCs and xMOOCs from a participant. I sincerely hope more learners take the time to reflect and share the experiences they have with this kind of learning context. I find as an educator that the student voice is important and assuming that the developers of MOOCs are prepared to listen to critique, both postive and negative, then this is a valuable factor which can lead to improvements which hopefully will have a positive effect on the learner experience and quality of learning.

 

 

 

Hamline CTL's curator insight, February 6, 4:22 PM

MOOCs are not going away!

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Colleges Turn to Crowd-Sourcing Courses | NYT | Tara Lewin

Colleges Turn to Crowd-Sourcing Courses | NYT | Tara Lewin | Networked Learning - MOOCs and more | Scoop.it

"Teaching Introduction to Sociology is almost second nature to Mitchell Duneier, a professor at Princeton: he has taught it 30 times, and a textbook he co-wrote is in its eighth edition. But last summer, as he transformed the class into a free online course, he had to grapple with some brand-new questions: Where should he focus his gaze while a camera recorded the lectures? How could the 40,000 students who enrolled online share their ideas? And how would he know what they were learning?"

Peter B. Sloep's insight:

This is not only 'yet another story of a professor dipping his feet into MOOCing a course'. Although there is that aspect, this story is different in two respects. First, the course is in the humanities. This is significant as some have argued that MOOCs do not lend themselves to courses in the humanities, only to those in science and technology. Second, the results of the tests have been scored by the MOOCs own students, with the help of a detailed set of instructions. This in itself is not really unique, but what is, is that Dunemeier went through the trouble of comparing the student scores with those that he himself and a team of assistants put together: "So far, he has found an impressive correlation of 0.88. The average peer score was 16.94 of 24 possible points, compared with an average teaching-staff score of 15.64." Interestingly,  "Peer graders give more accurate scores on good exams than bad ones, they found, and the lower the score, the more variance among graders." So the students seem to be well able to pick out what is good, but are less consistent in deciding in what is bad. So, another criticism of MOOCs - they can't be graded because of their massiveness - seems not to be necessarily true. (@pbsloep)

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