e-learning-ukr

For anyone with even the vaguest of interests in MOOCs, this is a particularly useful article (in Computers & Education) as it contains the data on an extensive survey of the pedagogical (instructional) qualities of MOOCs. The paper is relatively short and makes for an easy read. For those who want the main conclusions, here they come.

76 MOOCs were scanned, 50 xMOOCs, 26 cMOOCs, using an instrument that contains items derived from Dave Merrill's five first principles of instruction and five more principles derived from the literature more generally. Of the 72 points that any one MOOC that was examined could, none scored higher than 28. The xMOOCs ranged from 3 to25 points, the cMOOCs from 3 to 28. So the xMOOCs score negligibly better only, in spite of the widely held belief that cMOOCs are the pedagogically superior kind. Although the survey logs the situation in 2013, I can't imagine that in a years' time things have significantly improved. So by and large, the conclusions still hold. 

These figures then bode ill for the wild plans of the past that MOOCs can replace most existing universities (Sebastian Thrun), falsifies Daphne Koller's claim that Coursera MOOCs are built on sound pedagogical principles, and puts and end the wide-spread fallacy that elite universities necessarily breed top level courses. They corroborate claims made by Tony Bates, which I have echoed here and elsewhere, that MOOCs ignore decades of research in technology-enhanced learning, indeed in instructional design tout court. @pbsloep

Very interesting paper.

Great collection of essays on MOOCs.

Great lessons to learn for our South African Higher Education institutions who are embarking on e-learning and online-course alternatives. We do not have to commit the same mistakes.

The real story of moocs perhaps?

http://www.parlorpress.com/pdf/invasion_of_the_moocs.pdf

A year ago in MOOC land is almost ancient history. An update to the EUA’s previous report therefore almost reads as something entirely novel. The present version of the report covers several issues. It provides an overview of the well-known international MOOC facilitators, describes their specific characteristics and then goes on to inventory the European reaction to them. According to the report, about one third of all current MOOCs are of European extraction. It then wonders whether there is a specific European dimension to MOOCs and compares them with MOOCs around the globe. Business models are also paid attention to, an area in which the USA and Europe seem to follow a different course: where venture capital plays a major role in the USA, university initiatives and governmental involvement, including that of the European Union, seem to characterise European MOOC development. Then MOOC pedagogy is discussed, also with an eye on the impact MOOCs may have on higher education in Europe. It is of course this last issue which prompted the European University Association to commission the first and this second report. 

There seems to be a flurry of reports that take stock of where we stand with respect to MOOCs. When some claim that MOOCS  have passed the top of the hype cycle and are heading for the trough of disillusionment, reports like this are certainly useful for historical purposes. But for us now, who lack the benefit of historical hindsight, the present report can help to make up our mind about the direction in which we want to head with MOOCs. Do they spell they end of public higher education? Not according to Europeans, it seems. Are they the latest development in a move towards opening up educational resources? Perhaps, and more so in Europe than in the USA.  Are they a boost to the use of technology-enhanced forms of learning in higher education? For sure and everywhere! @pbsloep

And then there is of course the question of whether completion matters. Martin raises that question too. The fundamental mistake is to compare a MOOC setting with a classroom setting, opening the gates to anybody even with only a remote interest versus a handpicked, in many respects homogeneous group of students who paid good money. Putting the comparison this way points out that the really interesting thing would be _not_ to find significantly lower completion rates in MOOCs.

The second mistake relates to an assumption that underlies many MOOC discussions: MOOCs are cheap, if they are as good as ‘regular’ courses, then they should replace such courses. That argument of course fails if completion rates are abysmal. The mistake here is that costs aren’t the only dimension in which MOOCs and regular courses are to be compared. Costs matter, but effectiveness (do people learn useful things, do they learn what they are supposed to) matters at least as much. I would suggest to contextualise discussions about completion rates by looking at  MOOCs as a means to some end. That implies that MOOCs for, say, continuous professional development need to be evaluated differently then MOOCs for Psychology 101. @pbsloep

Exactly what it says it is, but it nicely highlights the variety that underlies MOOCs and our talk about them (@pbsloep)

un concepto dudoso y intrigante.

H817 students, this blog and Sloep's response are worth thinking about. It's something we can directly relate to within our own MOOC. Are you satisfied with the learning effect and production of knowledge? Are blogs and forum postings mainly reiterations or are novel ideas coming to the fore and being developed in further discussions?

The introduction to the article sometimes paints perhaps too simplistic a picture (such as that the xMOOCs and cMOOCs exhaust the universe of possible MOOCs; cf my recent scoop in early March: http://sco.lt/8FAEJl) or a somewhat trite one (“MOOCs represents an emerging methodology of online teaching and an important development in open education.”). Still the article is an interesting contribution to  MOOC research for the methodology it employs: text mining and analysis of blogs on MOOCs. Language technologies - in this case concept analysis and mapping using leximancer - are a powerful means to crunch large amounts of textual data, often revealing patters that are not immediately apparent to the naked eye. The value of the article therefore does not lie in its introduction, but in the results and ensuing discussion. 

Chen summarises the results under the headings of benefits for learners, benefits for providers, and trends, concluding with a discussion of the limitations of his study. His conclusions are not earth shattering, but how could they? After all, this is a mere summary of what he came across in the 360 blog posts he analysed with the help of leximancer; it is not a position paper in any sense, at best it is a kind of meta-analysis. To put it differently, tongue in cheek, there’s no need to go through the 431 scoops I collected on these pages to get an impression of what has been discussed about MOOCs in blogs over the last 4 odd years. Read the article and you have a fair idea. And then you should go to individual blog posts to collect opinions. @pbsloep

This is the third trend report in a row  that Surf, in which Dutch higher education institutions collaborate on educational innovation with ICTs,  has published. It features contributions by academics and support staff throughout higher education in the Netherlands, thus reflecting the current state of the art. Although the perspective is wider than MOOCed education, the term MOOC features 430 times, at least once on almost all of its 69 pages. It goes to show that in the Netherlands, but likely in Europe as a whole, there is an intimate link between MOOCs and open education. ‘Open’ here means making use of open licenses (such a creative commons licenses), it stands in contrast with ‘open’ in the sense of for free, without cost, which applies to the courses of the large MOOC platforms (see also the EUA report next http://sco.lt/6QxgvZ). 

As indicated, all the topics covered in the report refer to MOOCs. To name a few of them:  flexibility and quality, postgraduate education, apps for open education, economics of open education, platforms, recognition of credits, testing and assessment, MOOCs in formal education, learning analytics, student perspectives, privacy and other legal issues. As with the previous trend reports, a useful collection of insights. @pbsloep

A trend analysis on MOOCs from all perspectives: institutional, educational, business, and technical. Interesting to see the insights of dutch scholars on how MOOCs can offer quality education, how can become sustainable business models. Of special interest is the second article about the potential of MOOCs to change education economics, supported with figures.

Another MOOC report, this time from University of London. Section 6 specially interesting for MOOC making. 

Project Planning a MOOC

The course teams involved with our MOOCs included experienced academics with familiarity in developing materials on a learning platform. Nonetheless, for each of them it was their first experience of MOOCs, as it was for the project planning team.

Delivering a MOOC

A range of styles and learning methods were adopted by the four MOOCs, appropriate to the subject matter covered. A MOOC structure of six weeks and 5-10 student effort hours per week of study appeared to be just right for the majority of students (55%). Some considerations for future delivery include:

< Well designed announcements at the beginning and end of each week that articulate with the topic coverage, learning activities and assessment methods can be effective at maintaining student interest and motivation.

< Management of forum threads and posts is a critical factor in dealing with massive scale short courses to ensure the majority of students are not affected negatively by the behaviour of a small number of the community, while preserving the openness of the discussion areas.

< The Coursera platform tools are significant and comprehensive in terms of plotting overall student activity, allowing evaluation of assessment data, as well as usage statistics on video resources and other learning activities; however, further refinement of these tools to enable both students and teaching staff to understand their progression at an individual level is necessary (and underway).

** Learning Resource Development

University of London MOOC Report .

I Barney Gracinger, U. London

Exactly what it says it is, but it nicely highlights the variety that underlies MOOCs and our talk about them (@pbsloep)

un concepto dudoso y intrigante.

Dedicated distance teaching universities ('open universities') arguably have always been in the MOOC business even though it did not go by that name. As to massiveness, it always has been their intention to achieve economies of scale by investing much effort in the design of a course and little in their deployment (that is, lecturing, tutoring, etc.). Similarly, they always have intended to be open, though not so much in the sense of having free enrolment, but much more in the sense of eliminating formal access thresholds and leaving it to the student to decide on the pace, place and timing of their studies. And, indeed, many are also involved in experiments with Open Educational Resources, struggling with the same sustainability question that the xMOOC platform providers: if you provided the content for free, where does your revenue stream come from? And finally, although most started off with correspondence learning as their teaching model, these universities were the first to see the opportunities online learning offered and have experimented with it even before the Internet took off.  However, none of them achieved the massiveness that current MOOCs do, none of them offered content fully for free. But then again, none of them could feed of the lavish kind of funding venture capital (or rich alumni) have made available to the current MOOC platforms. 

In the face of the MOOC craze, distance teaching universities have also started thinking about the question of where they fit into the higher education landscape, of whether business remains as usual or they should adapt. Terry Anderson addresses this question in his blog post and comes up with tow models: keep on doing what you have been doing thus far, but relabelling it as MOOCs and making a few changes; or getting into the business of assessing and crediting prior learning. In the first case, you remain a genuine university, in the second you specialise in only one service that universities offer. Terry doesn't make a choice, wisely so, it seems to me. The two alternatives do not exclude each other, nor do they exhaust all the options. So you could do both or invent yet other kinds of responses. One would be to work with a mixed services model: the basis content is free, you may acquire access to peer tutoring for a small fee and to personal tutoring by a teacher for a large fee,  you may acquire access to the exam for a fee and receive credits for a larger fee (as this requires that the exam be assessed by a teacher), etc. But there are no doubt other options to be explored.

Distance teaching universities should really seize the opportunity to advertise themselves, now that MOOCs have put online learning in the public eye. Actually, because of their historical development, they are in a much better position to address the challenges posed by the for-profit MOOCs than traditional universities. (@pbsloep)