Multilitteratus Incognitus

I guess is teaching preparation time!  These past few weekends I've been going through my online course, updating due dates for assignments, and slowly starting to make the changed to the various modules that I had scribbled down as the course was in progress last spring.  It's still up in the air as to whether or not the class will run so I am thinking of applying for an assistantship for this fall semester. In any case, in preparation for this course (if it runs) I've signed up for a variety of MOOCs on Coursera and on Canvas.net that deal with the subject of teaching online. I figure that this is a good opportunity for me to get some professional development, but also to discover any materials that I was unaware of. This way I can share these materials with my students (the course is about course design and teaching online).  My Pocket reader had filled with a lot of reading to go through and evaluate.  As I was reading some of the materials this one stood out...

A couple of years ago I was working on hashing out this idea of Academic Check-ins.  Think of it as Foursquare meets informal learning meets campus engagement meets alternative credentialing. A paper came out of that brainstorming with a proposal of what such a system might look like.  While working on hashing out some ideas I wanted to dive deeper into this concept of motivation, both internal and external.  One of the potential issues with extrinsic motivators such as the various "goodies" that you get for checking into places†. While there wasn't a magic bullet (at least in the background research I did) for a good balance between internal and external motivators there was one huge warning: be very careful of external rewards for doing things. They slowly start to replace internal motivation that was there, and if you remove those external rewards, there is a danger of internal motivation not being there to sustain the learner.  This was somewhere in the back...

Alright, #MassiveTeaching (or under its official name: "Teaching Goes Massive: New Skills Need") on Coursera is over, that's all he wrote (and then deleted, and someone else recovered). All joking aside, I decided to participate in the final assignment/test of the course which ultimately turned out to be a Level 1 evaluation. I've included the three questions in my previous blog post about this. What I neglected to include in my previous blog post was a fourth question which went something like this: Would you recommend this course to someone else? The requirement to "pass" the assessment was to grade 4 submissions. I ended up "Grading" 14 submission because I was really surprised at the results. Of these 14 graded assignments, 8 of them were positive (57%) and these respondents claimed that they would, or have already recommended the course to their colleagues. One person commented that this course would be good for professional development an...

It's now the end of Teaching Goes Massive: New Skills Required (aka #massiveteaching) on coursera. Well, almost, we still have a couple of days left. I guess that the lesson here is that we were (the "learners") were punk'd† by Paul-Olivier Dehaye of the Univerisity of Zurich. After that last blog post (and subsequent pickup of the post by George Siemens and others) Inside Higher Education and the Chronicle wanted to chat with me about this MOOC experience. I only had time for one of the two before things went to press, so my 15 minutes of fame went to IHE.  Both IHE and the C hronicle have written about the topic, and have received some information from Coursera on the incident.  Others have also written about it (see here , here and here ) It's surprising to me that the University, and Coursera, waited until after this thing was a big issue in order to respond in the class, and clue people into what was happening. On Wednesday (day 3 of Week 3/3 of the ...

Well, I am not quite sure what to make of this just yet, but I am keeping an eye on the situation to see how it gets resolved.  What situation am I talking about?  The seemingly under-reported (or not reported at all) situation happening in the course Teaching Goes Massive: New Skills Required , which is offered by Paul-Olivier Dehaye of the University of Zurich.  I have to say that initially the course description did not draw me in because anyone who claims that they will teach you about MOOC teaching is either naive, or selling snake-oil since the developments are so new.  I would prefer an approach, like a collaborative exploration (pioneered by a colleague), or something like #rhizo14 on the topic.  In any case, I re-read the description (below) and decided that I had 3 weeks to devote to the course.  My approach would have been a cMOOC style approach since the instructor didn't have a set syllabus. This way I could, potentially, continue to explore...