Serendipity35

Moodle, the open source learning management system, has been used for MOOCs, including some of the original MOOC courses, like Connectivism and Connective Knowledge. That course was started in 2008 at the University of Manitoba and run by Stephen Downes (National Research Council of Canada) and George Siemens (Athabasca University).

Now, "Moodle for Teachers: An Introduction" will be Moodle.org's first MOOC. It is a 4 week introductory course for those who are new to using Moodle to teach. They recommend that you spend 8-12 hours per week participating in the course. Registration opens on 19 August 2013 and the course starts on 1 September 2013. There are no fees for taking the course and successful participants will be awarded a Mozilla Open Badges course completion badge that they can add to their Open Badges backpack.

Moodle partners (who use the free Moodle software but offer services for a fee) have offered Moodle Course Creator Certification courses for fees running from $200-$800 for at least five years (AKA Moodle Teacher Certificate), so it will be interesting to see if Moodle's free offering can replace those.

More at: http://learn.moodle.net

Sarah Luchs posted her seven takeaways from “Designing Breakthrough School Models,” the summer institute in San Francisco where Next Generation Learning Challenges (NGLC) convened the 30 of their grantees.

Here's my slightly revised version of her list.

Expect change. In fact, plan for it.
A key factor to succeeding in college (uh, and life) is persistence or what some call grit.
Self-directed learning requires skills, knowledge and a supporting culture that is radically different from the model of traditional schooling.

If you are working with traditionally under-served student populations and small-group work is one of your key instructional strategies
It takes time and thoughtful preparation to engage high-needs kids in new learning models. (Hint: Setting them out on their own in the name of self-directed learning doesn’t work.)
Let technology help your students master the lower levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy.
You will not get 100% of what you intend; you may only get 30%. And even that will take three times longer than you think.  Accept this. Keep going.

To learn more about the 30 grantees who are planning new breakthrough school models, view their info pages at http://nextgenlearning.org/wave-iv-planning

 

According to an op-ed on FORBES, it will be online education that will be the next "bubble" to burst rather than traditional university learning. The latter is what has been predicted by many, including myself, since we entered the 21st century and especially in the past year or more as MOOCs have emerged.

That article by John Tamny is not another MOOCs-will-destroy-academia story and the author is not an education writer but one who writes about economics and politics.

He writes that "...when parents spend a fortune on their children’s schooling they’re not buying education; rather they’re buying the ‘right’ friends for them, the right contacts for the future, access to the right husbands and wives, not to mention buying their own (“Our son goes to Williams College”) status."

It might anger educators to read that "Kids go to college for the experience, not for what’s taught." Parents and kids are willing to pay Brown University $50,000 per year intuition. The author claims that the universities are not a bubble about to pop because they still open doors to opportunities and people are still willing and eager to attend and pay the price tag through loans. It's an investment.

Tamny's conclusion:

There’s no college-education ‘bubble’ forming simply because teens go to college with an eye on a fun four years, after which they hope the school they attend will open doors for a good job. Online education only offers learning that the markets don’t desire, and because it does, its presumed merits are greatly oversold. There’s your ‘bubble.’

What do you think?

In social media, Facebook dominates, but in 2012 (its ninth year), it lost users. It also hit the 1 billion monthly active user mark globally last year. The lost monthly active users dropped by 1.4 million which is a small but symbolic drop.

Other social networks also experienced a slowdown after a few years of steady expansion. 2012 was a time of leveling off. In America, it grew at about 7% rather than the 20 and 30% of previous years.

But outside the U.S., social media growth is quite different. In India, social media users grew by an estimated 51.7 %. China’s social media user base increased 19.9% and in Latin America it grew at a 16.3 percent clip. Russian use grew by about 11%.

You can find these statistics on several sites online, but I found them on sites like www.businessinsider.com because these international users are of great interest to sites like Facebook. (Facebook is estimated to be the most popular social network in all but 10 countries around the world.)

In China, QQ, an instant messaging platform started in 1999 now claims it has about 800 million monthly active users, although it is more of a jumping off point to access other popular networking sites like WeChat.

WeChat (AKA Weixin) is a mobile platform for instant messaging and video calls with photo sharing and status updates and has 190 million monthly making is as big as Twitter there. Business brands like Starbucks, Nike and Durex are testing these networks for their advertising.

So, while Facebook is still on top, when you turn your gaze beyond our shores, there is competition.