Multilitteratus Incognitus

Well, 2015 is done!  Grades are in, courses are complete, and things are in process for next year.  Next spring I am not teaching, so I am thinking about cool (and instructive) things I can implement for the course that I am scheduled to teach this summer (intro to instructional design). I won't work too hard on next summer's course just yet, too many other things to consider first.  That said, I realized late in December that 2015 was an interesting teaching year for me.  I am usually only allowed to teach 2 courses per calendar year, but through some fluke - and departmental needs- I ended up teaching three courses, all of which were at different ends of the spectrum for learners.  One of the courses was for learners around the mid-point of their learner career, one at the beginning, and one at the end.  It was also an interesting year because I handed off  the course that I've taught for a long time to a friend and colleague, and I picked two...

Socrates Badge, by @merryspaniel It's a bit hard to believe, but two years ago - around this time of year - I was scurrying to get my application into Athabasca University to have my application considered for Cohort 7.  The deadline for Athabasca's program is at the same time as the deadline for my department (January 15th), so I was trying to make sure that my recommendations were all in order.  I had applied to another program prior to Athabasca (surprisingly enough I never heard back from them...) so I had tapped into my referee base already and I didn't want to burn them out (again). Well, things worked out, my application went in, and I made the short list (#woot!).  Now, with a year-and-a-half under my belt, I am about to begin EDDE 804 ( Leadership and Project Management in Distance Education ).  The Moodle course isn't available yet (darn!) so I can't yet tell much of the actual mechanics and slant that the course will take.  I am wondering how ...

Back for another review of a chapter in the book titled  Macro-Level Learning through Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs): Strategies and Predictions for the Future  (an IGI global title).  This time I am reviewing (a little) chapter 4 and jumping off from there.  The chapter title is " PMOOCs and the Art Studio: A Catalyst for Innovation and Change in eLearning Development and Studio Pedagogies ", and based on the title this chapter had me intrigued.  I am not very familiar with Studio-Based education, so was looking forward to learning a little more about that as well.  This might be a good chapter for fellow Athabascan (or Athabascian?) from Cohort 6. Anyway the abstract for this chapter is as follows: The challenges of MOOCs are currently a significant issue for universities. New contexts of openness, massiveness and collaboration on the Web are challenging traditional forms of university education delivery. These challenges are catalysts for c...

I've been trying to catch up with things I've saved in my Pocket reading list over the course of this past semester, and one of the articles (or blog posts?) came across was about how MOOCs have failed to democratize education, and given that this was one of the fundamental goals of MOOCs this is a problem. I don't think I know where exactly this goal, or rhetoric, about democratizing education came from.  I suspect that it was somewhere in the xMOOC discourse around the end of 2011 and the beginning of 2012.  Even if xMOOC providers, and their proponents, didn't initiate this discourse, they certainly capitalized on it by providing cases of poor learners, who would normally not be served by higher education given their backgrounds, and MOOCs could help. It's easy when you have prodigies to start with, but that's a whole other story. The point is that xMOOC providers just added some fuel to the fire since this discourse suited them. And, it's not a bad...

Back for another review of a chapter in the book titled  Macro-Level Learning through Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs): Strategies and Predictions for the Future  (an IGI global title).  This time I am reviewing (a little) chapter 3 and jumping off from there.  The chapter title is " Professional Learning through MOOCs?: A Trans-Disciplinary Framework for Building Knowledge, Inquiry, and Expertise ", and based on the title it really had me hooked! This is a chapter that I was really looking forward to reading because it seemed like a good chapter to tackle workplace learning, professional development, talent development, and where MOOCs fit into this arena.  If you remember last year, some people had professed 2015 (or was it 2014?) to be the year that MOOCs made it into the enterprise (LOL). Anyway, the abstract for this chapter is as follows: This chapter will locate debates around MOOCs within a discussion on the purposes of higher education for prof...

Continuing on with the review of articles in the book titled  Macro-Level Learning through Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs): Strategies and Predictions for the Future  today I have a chapter dealing with quality of MOOCs Chapter 2  is titled  Quality Assurance for Massive Open Access Online Courses: Building on the Old to Create Something New . The abstract tells us: Institutional quality assurance frameworks enable systematic reporting of traditional higher education courses against agreed standards. However, their ability to adequately evaluate quality of a MOOC has not been explored in depth. This chapter, Quality Assurance for Massive Open access Online Courses – building on the old to create something new, explores the added learning and teaching dimensions that MOOCs offer and the limitations of existing frameworks. Many components of a MOOC are similar to traditional courses and, thus, aspects of quality assurance frameworks directly apply, ho...

I came across this in PhD comics the other day: I am sure that the concept isn't novel  - I've been trying to get my friends and colleagues to do something like this for a few years now...to no avail. ;-)  I wonder if anyone in the AU EDDE cohorts wants to try something like this.  Or, maybe, a Magic the gathering type of card game with academics.  If you draw the George Siemens card you get +5 on network powers for 3 turns.  What do you think? ;-)

With the semester over, and the brain working on momentum, I've decided to capitalize on the spare brain-power, and time, to finally read a book that I agreed to write a review for back in the summer (yeah, I know - a tad bit late...). The book is a collection of articles titled  Macro-Level Learning through Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs): Strategies and Predictions for the Future (an IGI global title).  I'll come back to the topic of the book as a whole after I am done with this process.  I think that going through chapter-by-chapters, picking and reacting to some things that piqued (and poked at) my interests is a little more interesting that trying to condense 15 chapters into one book review. This is sort of what I did with the #rhizoANT review. Chapter 1 is titled  Mining a MOOC: What Our MOOC Taught Us about Professional Learning, Teaching, and Assessment .  The abstract gives us a sense of the article: In July 2014, a massive open online...

Now that school is over, and grading is almost over for the course I am teaching this semester, I finally have an opportunity to go through and continue my quest to read existing MOOC literature.  I had started this past September reading a collection of articles in an IGI publication titled  Macro-Level Learning through Massive Open Online Courses which I got electronically for a limited time in order to do a book review.  Needless to say that between work, school, and personal priorities this book review (and reading of articles) went in the back, back, back burner.  I also noticed that colleagues Markus Deimann and Sebastien Vogt published a special issue on MOOCs in Europe on IRRODL recently .  It would not be an understatement to say that I could probably take a year off from my EdD program just to read all the MOOC related research that has been published (and retrieved) in the past two years.  I'd say it's been gathering dust, but it's all in t...

...Schoool's out...until January... OK, OK,... maybe my take on Alice Cooper's "School's Out" isn't as catchy...but it is indicative of the situation right now :-)  EDDE 803 is over, and I am waiting for EDDE 804 to begin.  Well, technically the course is over tomorrow, however all assignments are done and submitted, and I am not in maintenance mode  in the forums. The final assignment was really a reflection on the internship, what I got out of it, what things that I learned in the course I applied, and what I foresee applying to my own professional practice. As I wrote in my reflection, both for the course and for the internship, I wasn't really sure what I was going to get out of it that I didn't already (somewhat) know when I came into the course.  My background is in instrucitonal design, and I have been teaching for a few years.  It's not that I think I'm perfect and that I can't improve, but sometimes you don't know wha...