Multilitteratus Incognitus

**** CALL EXTENDED FOR DEVLEARN & OTHER CONFERENCES *** Call for Chapters & Illustrators: The Great Big MOOC Book (version 1.0) Editors Apostolos Koutropoulos (University of Massachusetts Boston). Call for Chapters & Illustrators  Proposals Submission Deadline: November 15th, 2013 Full Chapters Due: April 15, 2014 R evision Submission Date: August 1st, 2014 Introduction  This book will explore the various aspects of MOOCs (cMOOCs and xMOOCs). It will serve as a primer into the MOOC field for professionals in the field of education, including professors, instructional designers, educational technologists, project managers, and administrators. The idea for this book came in 2011 after I had completed my first few cMOOCs, and seeing the nascent state of the field, I wanted to facilitate an open access book on the topic.  The original proposal, which got some traction but I never pursued, can be seen here:  http://bit.ly/147P574 Objective of...

Custom is an odd name of a badge :) Week 3 of the Mozilla Open Badges MOOC on Coursesites (half way through) and we are continuing our exploration of using badges for the #ESLMOOC. As with previous posts, the prompt of the challenge comes first followed by my thoughts on the subject. Prompt: Challenge Assignment 3: Competency Frameworks for a Badge Ecosystem At the next level of complexity, we consider the ecosystem of five principal sets of stakeholders: Learning Providers Assessors Job Seekers Employers Standards Organizations And an additional component: Badges Competency Definition Employers are governed by regulations, industry standards, and best practices. Employers need employees whose skills and competencies support and advance business objectives in accordance with these requirements. Standards organizations get input from academic research and employers about evolving best practices, and, in turn, provide guidance, even governance, over business pract...

It's week two (of six) in the #OpenBadgeMOOC and the challenge for this week is to think about and define the Currency  of an Ecosystem. As with the first blog post in this series, this thought process relates to the #ESLMOOC that I am thinking of developing as part of a potential dissertation proposal, and the writing instructions for this challenge are posted in the first part of the blog post, followed by my brainstorming. Challenge Instructions: Challenge Assignment 2: Define the Currency of an Ecosystem At the next level of complexity, we consider the ecosystem of four principal sets of stakeholders: Learning Providers Assessors Job Seekers Employers And an additional component: Badges When badges are introduced into the basic ecosystem model, we can see the decoupling of learning providers and competency/skill assessment, and “Assessors” are added to the model as another set of stakeholders. Why? Because badges are tied to assessment; badges are awarded when ...

I wish I could find a caricature of a personification of a MOOC as a super hero. It would fit really well in this post :)  I was recently reading a news item on the washington post titled  The Tuition is Too Damn High, Part IX: Will MOOCs save us? I have to say that it's amazing to me that Khan Academy is still included in the MOOC category even though Khan Academy isn't really about MOOCs.  That said, who knows, maybe in the future Khan Academy might turn into a MOOC-shop in the future (if they see money in it). Anyway, the point of this post is really about the flipped classroom model, and not about MOOCs.  Sure, the Washington Post talks about MOOCs as a potential savior for Universities and Student's wallets but what the article really is talking about is using MOOC content as a way to flip the face to face classroom; and this has nothing to do with MOOCs. It seems to me that if we didn't have money, time, energy, and/or the will to create resources for our f...

The other day I was reading this blog post on why MOOC forums are counter-productive .  I was really thinking hard about this and my initial inclination is to agree. Forums, in MOOCs, are  counter-productive. But, as with most things in life, there is a big asterisk here. If we look at how MOOCs are setup, and by MOOC here I mean xMOOC since that's what most people think of, the discussion board is one big crazy mess. Coursera has done something interesting in crowdsourcing thread relevancy by allowing people to up-vote or down-vote threads, but at their core these discussions are setup like every other discussion forum out there in traditional education: There usually is a prompt that people will answer, and answers can be repetitive as well, so when you are the 1000th poster to a question prompt and you see that others have answered something similar to your answers, what is the motivation to wade through many, many, many similar answers in order to find the subtle conte...

Who am I? ** Updated on 9/19 with more detailed personas** Well, I will try to stay regular with these Mozilla Badge MOOC challenges (goal is it get them our each Saturday so I don't fall behind and other things get in the way).  I've decided that for the Badge Challenge I will start brainstorming on the topic of my ESL MOOC, that topic that's been floating in my mind as a potential PhD Dissertation topic.  These, of course, may change while I further process the topic, but someone's gotta start somewhere. Prompt for the challenge (scroll down for my contribution): Define a Current Ecosystem At a basic level, we consider the ecosystem of three principal sets of stakeholders: Learning Providers Job Seekers Employers Traditionally, we have viewed these three principal sets of stakeholders as having a fairly simplistic, linear relationship: Traditional higher education institutions and other types of learning providers (e.g., trade schools) impart knowledg...

Well, new semester, new experimentation with xMOOCs (I didn't see any cMOOCs on the docket this fall).  I decided to try out a few MOOCs on subjects that are interesting to me, as always, while I try to find my way toward a potential dissertation proposal. The first two MOOCs are on coursera and they are "Online Games: Literature, New Media, and Narrative" from Vanderbilt and "Video Games and Learning" from University of Wisconsin - Madison.   Video Games and Learning begins next month, so I have some time to take in Online Games: Literature, New Media, and Narrative before that one starts. Right off the bat, I see that  Online Games: Literature, New Media, and Narrative  has two tracks, a "regular" and a "distinction" track. The difference in the distinction track is that you have to participate online in the LOTRO MMORPG (free) and to complete three peer reviewed exercises.  My time is limited this semester so starting a new RPG wh...

scavenged image I am not sure where I found this blog post (probably through an RSS feed somewhere), but I am glad it came my way.  In his initial reflections on the Hyperlinked Library MOOC , this author talk about feeling a bit patronized by earning certain   badges. It's like you can't take two steps before someone throws a badge at you and tells you that you're awesome ;-) A while back, when I was doing some research into motivation by means of awards for a paper I was working on, I did find that there wasn't (yet) that much research on badging. There was, however, a lot of psychology related research on motivation, intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, and the affects that rewards and reward mechanisms had on motivation, and specifically motivation to learn.  There were some pretty cool findings (must find articles to post references at some point).  While I don't remember everything off the top of my head, I do remember that motivation is quite a complex t...

A Smock The other day an article came across my radar with the title " Don't Call it a MOOC ." Well, of course, I really had to read it because it kind of sounds like MOOC is an insult, so don't insult a course by calling it a MOOC ;-) As if MOOC isn't a bad enough acronym, UT-Austin somehow found a worse one, SMOC (pronounced "smock").  So, what is this SMOC, other than a poor, and unnecessary acronym? Basically, what it boils down to a SMOC (synchronous massive online course) is nothing more than a live webcast of two rockstar professors in a television studio.  I really fail to see where the innovation is, considering the fact that what you really have here is the digital equivalent of sitting in a 1000-seat auditorium, in a face to face introductory course. Sure, they say they have tutors for "small" groups of students, but, as a commenter on the article points out, that is still around 80 students per assistant.  Even then, it's ...

Happy Labor Day everyone! The other day I was going through my two Learning Solutions Magazine articles to see if there were any comments ( Part 1 and Part 2 here) that I might be able to address.  I think it's great when people engage with the reading material on the web in a constructive way, it helps everyone expand their knowledge a little. That said, the comments weren't that many, and they were from a while back, so I thought I would address them here. Comment 1 I'm not sure how you can say that "MOOCs first appeared in 2008." Remove the word "online" from MOOC and you have International Correspondence Schools. Response I think the underlying current of this comment is "everything old is new again." Now, don't get me wrong, I don't think anyone is claiming that MOOCs are this whole new genesis that came from nothing and is here to change the world like nobody's business. However, one can't dismiss that this c...