Serendipity35

"Since well before MOOCs emerged, the University of California at Berkeley has been giving away recordings of its lectures on YouTube and iTunesU. In fact, Berkeley has become one of the most-generous distributors of free lectures on the web, adding some 4,500 hours of video per year.

But that web channel, webcast.berkeley.edu, will soon stop adding fresh content. Last month officials announced that, because of budget cuts, the university will no longer offer new lecture recordings to the public, although the videos will still be available to students on the campus."

continue reading at chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/

 

It caught my attention in an article from EDUCAUSE that surveys of 11 MITx courses offered on edX in spring 2014 found that one in four (28%) of the respondents self-identified as past or present teachers.

Of course, being that it is a "massive" course, those teachers are only 4.5 percent of the nearly 250,000 enrollees. But those teachers generated 22.4 percent of all discussion forum comments.

One of the exciting things about teaching a MOOC or being a student in one is that the participants often come from the diverse backgrounds.

This look at the presence of teachers in MOOCs suggests that we might want to offer topics for teachers more often and perhaps utilize those teachers when we teach a MOOC.

The MOOC I facilitated on Canvas Network in 2013 was called "Academia and the MOOC" and was intended to attract teachers as well as others in academic roles (instructional designer, support staff, administration and student).

We critiqued some case studies of successful and "failed" MOOCs that have been offered and considered how MOOCs might impact those roles and an institution. By design, I wanted to use the participants' collective professional experience.

The article discussed a massive course that precedes the first MOOCs by about 50 years. In 1958, an introductory physics course called "Atomic-Age Physics" was offered by NBC's Continental Classroom on free broadcast TV. It was estimated that the course/program had a daily viewership of about 250,000 people. It even had 300+ institutions partnering to offer varying levels of accreditation for the course - something modern MOOCs are just starting to do.

Who was this physics on air course reaching? Most were just people with an interest in modern physics, but a good number of the participants were teachers who were upgrading their science background. There were about 5,000 participants who were certified in the first year. Continental Classroom offered more courses and it was an early use of technology, distance learning or ITV (instructional television) with teachers as a targetted audience.

If a substantial number of teachers are on MOOC rosters then we should be considering, as the article suggests, that we create "expert-novice pairings in courses, networking educators around pedagogy or reusable content, and generally tailoring courses to satisfy the needs of teachers." MOOCs offer an opportunity for teacher professional development.

Coursera has already launched a "teacher professional development" series and edX announced a professional development initiative focusing on advanced placement high school courses.

How having significant numbers of educators in a MOOC may impact the other participants and the course design sounds like a good area for future research.

“We’re discovering that there are a huge number of willing and eager lifelong learners that are underserved” by higher education. We’re getting to the point where we’ll be profitable as a company.”  - Sebastian Thrun. Udacity 

Are those words frightening to higher education? The quote comes from an article with a frightening title: "Meet the New, Self-Appointed MOOC Accreditors: Google and Instagram."

One issue that has been wrapped around the MOOC since they were the big story in 2012, and more so since they they became seen as an alternate route for educating employees, is whether employers will take them seriously as credentials.

Though academia has shown some interest in this, partially out of fear of lost tuition, the big MOOC producers and providers have been more interested.

Now, some of them say that they have found a way to "jump-start employer buy-in" by getting major companies to help design the course and the sequence of course that would lead to a specialization or certificate.

Coursera is an example of a MOOC platforms that has now teamed up with more than half a dozen companies to create "capstone" projects for its courses. The companies include Google, Instagram and Shazam. they are not only big tech player, but ones that carry cachet with students.

Colleges are not totally out of the game. Coursera has 19 colleges that work with them on a kind of "microdegrees." (Coursera calls them "Course Specializations.")  In these, students first take a designed series of short MOOCs, but finish with a hands-on capstone project. It's a model that colleges are used to offering in their own regular degrees.

Coursera has been running a pilot of this since summer 2014. It is a Data Science Specialization from Johns Hopkins University that also involved the company SwiftKey that builds keyboard apps for smartphones.

Then there is profit. This particular approach provides revenue to support the free courses. For students to get the certificate proving they passed the courses and the capstone, they pay around $500 in fees.

Rather than a university seal-of-approval, these MOOC/certificate programs have approval from these companies which may be more appealing to the job-seeking graduate or the employee looking to upgrade skills for job advancement.

We are talking education and profit here. Daphne Koller, co-founder of Coursera, clearly knows and talks about that. She said that these partnerships “really drive home the value proposition that these courses are giving you a skill that is valuable in the workplace.”

Colleges may not appreciate that she also feels that Coursera is helping in “bridging the gap” between higher education and industry. But other MOOC providers would probably agree.

Udacity has already gotten a lot of attention for its project with the Georgia Institute of Technology that has backing and input from AT&T for a $7,000 master’s degree in computer science. Udacity calls their approach "nanodegrees" and has ties to Google and other companies.

The MOOC provider edX (started by Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology) has also had Google support some course development.

And, looking ahead, I still believe that we will hear about Google offering its own free Learning Management System in the near future and that will be a huge disruptor in an arena that is a very profitable enterprise platform for schools and companies.







 

In that classic sports cheer tradition of "Gimme a [letter]" ending in "What's that spell?"  I want to spend a bit of time on the letters C and X which actually spell the two types of MOOCs we see being used today.

Tony Bates, for his open textbook Teaching in a Digital Age, is including a section on MOOCs and the differences in philosophy and practice between xMOOCs and cMOOCs.

In his textbook, Bates discusses how technology has changed knowledge. He mentions how Socrates criticised writing because it did not lead to "true" knowledge which came only from verbal dialogue and oratory. A clear case of someone stuck in their pedagogy and not open to new technology.

Clearly, writing is an important record of knowledge and way to transmit knowledge. The idea of "writing to learn" is also an established practice in academia.

Bates says that, "Now we have other ways to record and transmit knowledge that can be studied and reflected upon, such as video, audio, animations, and graphics, and the Internet does expand enormously the speed and range by which these representations of knowledge can be transmitted... Maybe this will eventually lead to a ‘knowledge revolution’ equivalent to the age of enlightenment. But I do not believe we are there yet..."

I have written about the differences between the C and X MOOC types too and my own belief (the basis for my own MOOC chapter in a forthcoming book) is that MOOCs are still evolving in their design.

The earliest MOOCs are now referred to a cMOOCs, but the xMOOC design is the dominant design format right now.

xMOOCs use LMS or CMS software that allows for large registrations, storage and and streaming of content and ways to assess and grade student performance. They use the video lectures common to many smaller online courses. They often are designed in lengths similar to traditional semesters. Due to the large enrollments, assessments may be automated, machine-scored or use peer reviews. Like traditional learning online and in a classroom, the courses have assignments. Students may be placed in groups.  

Obviously, this xMOOC model of learning is focused on the transmission of information rather than direct interaction between an individual participant and the instructor that we are used to in F2F learning and also in the better online courses..


cMOOCs turn much of the content creation to contributions from the participants with an emphasis on networking. Stephen Downes has taught in the MOOC setting since the very beginning.

Bates notes Downe's four key design principles for cMOOCs as:
autonomy of the learner(choosing what content or skills they wish to learn) , learning is personal, and thus there being no formal curriculum
diversity in both the tools used and in the participants and their knowledge levels
interactivity co-operative learning, networking between participants
openness in access to the course, but also in using open content, activities and assessment


Think about the transmission of information, the xMOOC is rooted in the expert gives information they have selected to novices, but the cMOOC takes the center away from the instructor and gives it to the learners.



Is one of these two formats superior? they serve different purposes. the xMOOC is more popular probably because it is closer to the traditional online learning that has more history and it feels close to what classroom teachers have been doing for centuries.

Connectivism is fairly new as an approach to teaching, less familiar and perhaps harder to "justify" in academia. The latter is especially true if you want the MOOC to operate in a way that fits typical grading for credit situations. 

Either way, MOOCs spell an evolution in digital learning and it is likely that other branches will form with other approaches to online learning.