Serendipity35

I have suspected for awhile that Google is interested into moving deeper into education. I don't mean Google Apps for Education. I think they are interested in providing a way to deliver online courses - a learning management system that ties into other Google apps and tools.

Course Builder is an early foray for Google into online education. It was used to build their Power Searching with Google online course. In that course, Dan Russell took "students" through locating information and solving
search problems. Google’s Course Builder
toolkit was developed by Peter Norvig. He is the person who taught the original
open Artificial Intelligence class at Stanford with Sebastian Thrun that helped popularize MOOCs. The frameworks and templates that Russell used for his
courses were then open-sourced by Google.

Course Builder contains software and instructions for presenting your course material. It can be connected to other Google products to create a course community and to assess the effectiveness of your course.

Course Builder requires technical
skills that are more like a webmaster than an instructor. You would need some background in HTML and JavaScript.
But from the reviews that I have seen online, some designers/developers say that Course Builder is more user-friendly than other open source tools, such as those from edX. (Similar course-building tools from Coursera and Udacity get good reviews but are not yet widely available.)

Right now, Course Builder is not suitable for teachers to use without technical help. And Google is not the place to go to host your course or MOOC. But, I suspect that may not be the case in a few years.

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?