Everything open

Most people who take massive open online courses already hold a degree from a traditional institution, according to a new paper from the University of Pennsylvania.

The paper is based on a survey of 34,779 students worldwide who took 24 courses offered by Penn professors on the Coursera platform. The findings—among the first from outside researchers, rather than MOOC providers—reinforce the truism that most people who take MOOCs are already well educated.

A review of the OER MOOC COER13, Course on Open Education Resources, using Gráinne Conole’s rubric of 12 dimensions to evaluate a MOOC.

Website of Pontydysgu ltd., a Welsh educational research institute.

As promised the first in a mini series about Open Education. Pontydysgu originally got into educational technology through using closed and proprietary software. The first ‘educational technology’ I can remember using was FirstClass running on an Open University / BBC server (accessed through I think, the Mosaic browser). Ironically it was a print book which stimulated our move into Open Source technologies – Eric Raymond’s The Cathedral and the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary, first published as a book in 1999.

Visualization mapping approaches for developing and understanding OER

MOOCs at Edinburgh: challenges and successes was the next talk from Sian Bayne, Edinburgh University, at the MOOCs and libraries event #mooclib which I am liveblogging.
She explained that Edinburgh already had a culture of digital education, including off campus Masters programme. Reasons included reputational gain, new partnerships, exploration of a new pedagogical space and - fun (nice to see that mentioned)!