Serendipity35

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.

Open Source "Swiss Knife" - illustration by Open Source Business Foundation - licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Back in 2008, I first posted here about what I was calling "Open Everything."  That was my umbrella term for the many things I was encountering in and out of the education world that seemed relevant to "Open" activities based on Open Source principles. The growth I saw nine years ago continues.

I had made a list of "Open + ______" topics I was encountering then, and I have updated that list here:
access
business
configuration
hosts
cloud
content
courseware
data
design
education
educational resources (OER)
format
government
hardware
implementation
innovation
knowledge
learning
music
research
science
source as a service
source licenses
source religion
source software
space
standards
textbooks
thinking

All these areas overlap with other categories that I write about on Serendipity35.

David Wiley makes the point in talking about one of these uses -"open pedagogy" - that "because 'open is good' in the popular narrative, there’s apparently a temptation to characterize good educational practice as open educational practice. But that’s not what open means. As I’ve argued many times, the difference between free and open is that open is “free plus.” Free plus what? Free plus the 5R permissions." Those five permissions are Retain, Reuse, Revise, Remix and Redistribute. Many free online resources do not embrace those five permissions. 

A colleague sent me a link to a new book, Open: The Philosophy and Practices that are Revolutionizing Education and Science. The book also crosses many topics related to "open": affordable education, transparent science, accessible scholarship, open science, and courses that share this philosophy.

That last area interests me again of late as I am taking on some work on developing courses using OER materials for this fall at a community college. These courses are not what could be labeled as "open courses." They are using Open Educational Resources. They are regular Gen-Ed courses with the traditional tuition and registration structure.
So, why remake a course using OER? 

Always on the list of reasons to lower the cost for students by eliminating (or greatly lowering the price of) a textbook and using open textbooks and resources. But there are more benefits to OER than "free stuff." This course redesign is also an opportunity to free faculty from the constraints of a textbook-driven curriculum. (Though, admittedly many faculty cling to that kind of curriculum design.)

David Wiley's warning is one to consider when selecting OER. Is a text "open" if it does not allow the 5R permissions? Wiley would say No, but many educators have relaxed their own definition of open to the point that anything freely available online is "open." It is not.

For example, many educators use videos online on YouTube, Vimeo or other repositories. They are free. You can reuse them. You can usually redistribute (share) them via links or embed code into your own course, blog or website. But can you revise or remix them? That is unlikely. I fact, they may very well be copyrighted and attempting to remix or revise them is breaking the law.

You might enroll in a MOOC in order to see how others teach a course that you also teach. It is a useful professional development activity for teachers. But it is likely not the case that you have the right to copy those mate rails and use them in your own courses. And a course on edX, Coursera or another MOOC provider is certainly not open to you retain, reusing, revising, remixing or redistributing the course itself.

There are exceptions. MIT's Open Courseware was one of the original projects to offer free course materials. They are not MOOCs as we know them today, but they can be a "course for independent learners." They are resources and you were given permissions (with some restrictions; see their mission video) to use them for your own courses.

I didn't get a chance to fully participate in the OpenLearning ’17 MOOC that started in January and runs into May 2017. It is connectivist and probably seems like an "Old School MOOC" in this 2017 dominated by the Courseras of the MOOC world. It is using Twitter chats, AMA, and Hangouts. You can get into the archives and check out the many resources. It is a MOOC in which, unlike many courses that go by that label today, where the "O" for "Open" in the acronym is true. Too many MOOCs are really only MOCs.

This week I have focused on thinking (and writing) about critical thinking. One point of entry to learning about critical thinking or one way to incorporate some of it in your teaching would be to view and use this playlist of critical thinking videos. 

Here is a sample:

You might also look at this article on using critical thinking in schools.

There are many online videos that offer an opportunity to talk about topics in critical thinking. Want to address the topic of argument? How about using Monty Python?

You could also teach logic via this twisted logic of Sir Bedivere leading the villagers down a path to determining whether or not a woman is a witch. 

And now for something completely different, let us take the example of understanding probability. One general theory of probability is Bayes’ Theorem, named for the 18th century statistician and philosopher Thomas Bayes. In probability theory and statistics, Bayes’ theorem describes the probability of an event, based on prior knowledge of conditions that might be related to the event.

Confused? For example, if Alzheimer's disease is related to age, then, using Bayes’ theorem, a person’s age can be used to more accurately assess the probability that they have the disease. Baye's theorem can be applied across a range of disciplines and it is a way of understanding what it means to think rationally.

I did a presentation last month titled "Gaming STEM in Humanities Courses" at the NJEDge Faculty Best Practices Showcase. 

I talked about using serious games, primarily the Web Adventures series developed by Rice University, as a way to increase students’ science knowledge and to inspire science-related careers. I was interested in “gaming” these STEM programs for teaching humanities courses.

I used the Web Adventures in several courses, but I particularly liked using it in an undergraduate critical thinking course. Take a look at the slides from the presentation.