Serendipity35

Several bills that recently came before the U.S. House of Representatives that would provide funding for people to enroll in alternative postsecondary pathways. As one article on usnews.com points out, this funding comes at the same time as a new study that looks at  the quality of these programs and the evidence of their efficacy.

That report, "The Complex Universe of Alternative Postsecondary Credentials and Pathways" authored by Jessie Brown and Martin Kurzweil and published by American Academy of Arts and Sciences, evaluated alternatives that I have written about here: certificate programs, market-focused training, work-based training, apprenticeships, skills-based short courses, coding bootcamps, MOOCs, online micro-credentials, competency-based education programs and credentials based on skill acquisition rather than traditional course completion.

The report is wide-ranging and worth downloading if these are educational issues that concern you. If they don't concern you and you plan to work in education for another decade, you should really pay attention.

I'm not at all surprised that the earning power for "graduates" of alternative programs varies widely depending on the subject studied. A computer science certificate program graduate, for example, can expect to earn more than twice what a health care or cosmetology certificate recipient will receive.

Who pursues these programs? Certificate programs, work-based training and competency-based programs tend to attract older, lower-income learners who have not completed a college degree. But 80% of bootcamp enrollees and 75% of MOOC participants already have a bachelor's degree.

What do the authors of this study recommend? Policy changes to collect more comprehensive data on educational and employment outcomes and to enforce quality assurance standards. Also to devote resources to investigating efficacy and return on investment. The U.S. News article also points out that 19 organizations have promoted greater federal oversight of career and technical education programs in a June letter to the House of Representatives about the Perkins Act Reauthorization.

You might have read earlier this year that the University of California, Berkeley started removing more than 20,000 video and audio lectures from public view that they had made freely available online. Why? It was the result of a Justice Department accessibility order requiring them to make the educational content accessible to people with disabilities.
UC Berkeley was one of the colleges in the forefront of posting to YouTube, iTunes U and their own webcast.berkeley.edu site. Accessibility for people with a wide variety of disabilities has been an issue with online courses for many years. Mostly, schools have "gotten away with it" when it comes to following requirements that largely came into focus primarily after the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) became law in 1990.
It's curious that the Justice Department’s investigation did not look at how Berkeley actually serves students with disabilities, but only the accessibility of content it offers to the public. As a result of this order the university will also require users sign in with University of California credentials to view or listen to them.
This is a scary ruling for other institutions who have been "getting away with it" and now may have to do the same as UC. 
All it took was complaints from two employees of Gallaudet University, the world's only university designed to be barrier-free for deaf and hard of hearing students. The employees said that Berkeley’s free online educational content was inaccessible to blind and deaf people because of a lack of captions, screen reader compatibility and other issues.
Unfortunately, to remedy these issues any university would need to implement measures that are very expensive to continue to make these resources available to the public. Since they were offered for free, there is really no business model that applies here other than charity. So, the immediate solution was to make them "inaccessible" to everyone by removing them. 
Berkeley can continue to offer massive open online courses on edX. They also plan to create new public content that is accessible.
One concern that many educators have is that this ruling will result in the disappearance of much Open Educational Resources.

Academy is Moodle's version of a MOOC) platform, It's not that some people and institutions haven't gone done the MOOC road using the Moodle platform that was originally developed in 2002 by Martin Dougiamas to help educators create online courses. The Moodle platform was conceived with a focus on interaction and the collaborative construction of content and it has evolved over the past 15 years quite successfully. But it was not designed with the aim of hosting a course that contained tens of thousands of learners with different (and perhaps more limited) interactions and less emphasis on student-centered content creation.
There was an announcement about Academy in May 2016 and the Academy platform is still a preliminary version. As far as I have read, it is being used by only one institutional partner (Dublin City University) and for seven courses that are currently in the pre-enrollment stage).
At first mention, Moodle Academy was being compared to the Canvas Network because it seemed that Academy would be a centralized MOOC hosting platform run and managed by Moodle. This would be ideal for institutions (or individuals?) who wanted to offer a MOOC but needed not only a platform but the servers and bandwidth to deal with massive users and activity. I taught a meta-MOOC called "Academia and the MOOC" in the spring of 2013 in Canvas Network, and have used Canvas to teach undergraduate courses at a university since then.
I signed up for an Academy account and pre-enrolled for a course to test out the platform. (No start date listed yet.) The course is "21C Learning Design" and described as being for teachers who want to develop 21st Century skills in learning design. There is currently no content, but the platform itself looks very much like a Moodle course. For example, filling in my profile information, photo etc. was the same, and the home page with topics also looks the same as what I have used when I teach in Moodle at NJIT. 
AS with Canvas and Canvas Network, I suspect that Moodle and Academy will differ more behind the scene and screen and feel very comfortably similar for Moodle users.
If you want to try out Academy, go to https://academy.moodle.net/ and register. If you decide to take the 21C class, please message me there. It would be interesting to meet some Serendipity35 readers in a MOOC platform. 

I recently took a free online MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) on "Drawing Nature, Science and Culture: Natural History Illustration" that is offered by the University of Newcastle (UOM Australia) that is now included in the edX platform. Readers here may be familiar with MOOCs, but if you are new to them, they are online courses that are offered for free. They are usually university courses, though many are hosted by MOOC providers (edX, Coursera etc.). To many people the experience will not be at all like "taking a course" at a university. It might be your first time learning online, and that is odd for anyone. They are "massive" because you probably will be one of thousands of students in the class. The "lectures" are probably videos and probably (thankfully) much shorter than the 90-minute ones you had in college.
This particular course is an "archived course" which means there is no active instructor. The six-week course was first offered with an instructor in October 2016. EdX keeps courses open for enrollment after they end to allow learners to explore content and continue learning. All features and materials may not be available, and course content will not be updated, but courses are sometimes offered "live" again.
Learners may take a MOOC for credit or to get a certificate of successful completion (it is an option for many courses) and pay a fee (generally far less than typical tuition). But the majority of learners take them for lifelong learning and perhaps professional development with no desire to get credit.
UON has a prestigious Natural History Illustration program. I do some drawing and painting, but I am certainly not an aspiring scientific or medical illustrator. That is one of the great things about these MOOCs. There is very little pressure and no prerequisites to taking a course. A middle school student could attempt one. You need no artistic background. You might want to take it to learn about the topic and not even expect to try drawing yourself.
I audited a few art courses as an undergraduate. I was an English major and they didn't count towards my degree requirements - and I wasn't really good enough to be in those courses, but professors often allowed a few extra students. Professors made it clear that you needed to attend classes and do the assignments, but you would not get the same attention as the tuition-paying students. The MOOC model is similar.
This course is about observing and illustrating subjects from nature, science and culture, with their linkages to the environment being central. My interest is half art interest and half my interest in nature.
My own artwork is not "realistic" so it was a challenge to try creating accurate replications of subjects from the natural world.
Topics included:
- Core scientific observational skills
- Field drawing and sketching techniques
- Concept sketch development
- Composition for natural history illustration
- Form, proportion and structure essentials
- Drawing and rendering techniques
There are sample videos from many edX courses on YouTube and that's a good way to get a taste of what is in a course.
Here is an intro from the illustration course.

This article first appeared on One-Page Schoolhouse.