Multilitteratus Incognitus

Chugging along (hey I can see the light at the end of the tunnel!) with my review of  Macro-Level Learning through Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs): Strategies and Predictions for the Future , which started some time last year.  Today under the microscope is chapter 10, which is titled  Redefining the Classroom: Integration of Open and Classroom Learning in Higher Education.   The abstract is as follows: The printing technology revolutionized the dissemination of knowledge at a pace never conceived of earlier. In recent times, radio and television brought education within the reach of masses. More recently, the multimedia technology, and Internet have revolutionized the delivery of education. Top universities of the world have collaborated to develop massive open online courses (MOOCs) that are made available to public either free of charge or at a nominal cost. Mainly supported by start-ups such as Coursera, Udacity, and EdX, MOOCs are mostly created ...

This morning, while commuting, I was able to read through another chapter in the book titled  Macro-Level Learning through Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs): Strategies and Predictions for the Future , which I started back in August of 2015 (or somewhere there about).  This time I am reviewing chapter 9, which is titled  Deceptive Promises: The Meaning of MOOCs-Hype for Higher Education.   The abstract is as follows: Since 2011, massive open online courses (MOOCs) fired the imagination of the general public as well as the academics, university administrators and investors alike. This chapter is an analysis of the main promises and expectations associated with MOOCs in higher education. This analysis is largely informed by a literature review of new extensive research reports, press releases, media articles, scholarly blogs and academic papers. Considering costs and benefits, ethical aspects and the impact on the landscape of higher education, the autho...

Hey!  It's week 2 in NRC01PL!  Well... no, it's not, it's probably like week 5 or something, but I am working at catching up ;-)  The second week of this MOOC (which I've only now joined the Google Group) is on the Content/practice dichotomy. It's interesting because this comes up quite a few times in discussions in academia. The pendulum seems to swing from extreme to extreme.  Too much practice (which I gather is perfectly fine with Stephen D), or too much theory and content. The videos that Stephen had for this week were pretty interesting.   It was interesting to get a little backend view of OpenEdx (considering that I have no interest in setting up my own LMS). From the demonstration of OpenEdx I think that it's nice that OpenEdx has the ability to break a course into sections...but as Stephen demonstrated this functionality I found myself questioning the rationale behind this. Sections are tools  we use in traditional classes in academia to ma...

So, the other day I was at the NERCOMP annual conference.  I heard a few people speak (cool stuff), and I also got an opportunity to chat with people, and be a nosy eavesdropper on other people's conversations.   One of the things that came up, as has come up elsewhere in the past three or so years, has been the concept of MOOCs as OER and MOOCs as OCW.  We've actually seen this with xMOOCs like Udacity as having their content labeled as open courseware. EdX uses the term "courseware" for their course materials on their MOOCs, whether they are open is an entirely different discussion.  Even my third MOOC ever (mobimooc 2011) had stated that the materials would remain as OER after the end of the MOOC. Then, I started to think about Dave Cormier's question, or potentially a challenge, on how to introduce newbie to the Rhizo14 MOOC that ended five weeks ago, but we are still active, on facebook at least.  All of this got me thinking about two things: ...

Just in case you missed it the other day, here is the link for the stream (which was live, but now should be available to stream) for the CIEE and USDLA sponsored event on Sustainability in MOOCs (in which I was a panelist ;-)  ). The event was quite interesting and this was my first panel discussion - where I met quite a few interesting people! In any case, if you see the stream you will see two keynote presentations before the panel, and both were interesting. In the first presentation what I found interesting were the philosophical foundations of MOOCs which include many elements of the Open movement such as Creative Commons, Open Source and Open Courseware; as well as the ethos of Massively Multiplayer Online games (MMOs). While the connection was probably there somewhere in my mind, I really hadn't thought about it that much in depth. The one thing that I corrected (tactfully, or not-tactfully, you be the judge :-)  ) is the assertion that the Stanford AI course was ...

With the course almost over, I decided to undertake the OpenEd Evangelism badge. The requirements for the OpenEd Evangelist badge are: OpenEd Evangelist  (Journeyman level, complete for 1 topic to earn the badge) Construct an argument by which you could persuade someone to adopt the topic as an ongoing practice. Your argument should include at least five elements (kinds of evidence), with references.Write a blog post describing your argument in detail.  Have a conversation with a faculty member in which you use your argument to try to persuade them to adopt the topic as an ongoing practice.  Without revealing his or her identity, write a blog post describing your conversation and the reactions, responses, counterarguments, and concerns of the faculty member and announcing your intent to have completed the badge. Here are the reactions I got from a fellow colleague (on the previous Formulation post): I must admit that my formulation wasn't completely new...

With the course almost over, I decided to undertake the OpenEd Evangelism badge. The requirements for the OpenEd Evangelist badge are: OpenEd Evangelist (Journeyman level, complete for 1 topic to earn the badge) Construct an argument by which you could persuade someone to adopt the topic as an ongoing practice. Your argument should include at least five elements (kinds of evidence), with references.Write a blog post describing your argument in detail.  Have a conversation with a faculty member in which you use your argument to try to persuade them to adopt the topic as an ongoing practice.  Without revealing his or her identity, write a blog post describing your conversation and the reactions, responses, counterarguments, and concerns of the faculty member and announcing your intent to have completed the badge. So for this blog post I will formulate my argument.  My main argument around Open Education is that it benefits the learners and as such department...

I've been dabbling with the OER "week" in introduction to open education  this week. I have to say that I've been a big proponent of OER (from a theoretical standpoint) for quite some time now.  I do believe that it is important for educators (especially those in public institution) to share their contributions for free and feed them forward.  The actual implementation is what I am stumbling a bit on in that it generally takes more time to go through OER resources in order to find something that works best in your  course sequence, and at times you don't even find that. A complaint that came across in OERu's #OCL4ED workshop was that it was more time consuming going through OER to find what might work well in your course, compared to going with some publisher's pre-packaged (and not-free) materials. That being said, there were a few quite interesting resources in the readings. For example, A Basic Guide to Open Educational Resources  is a nice (and fre...

As part of the researcher badge requirements I need to also contribute some new resources to the course for fellow participants. Here are some sources that I have found interesting: Academic Articles Friesen, N. (2009). Open Educational Resources: New Possibilities for Change and Sustainability. International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning. 10(5). Retrieved from: http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/article/view/664/1388 This article tackles OER, and OCW is considered as a subset of OER. It examines a number of different OER initiatives and examines the sustainability issues and challenges. Carson, S. (2009). The unwalled garden: growth of the OpenCourseWare Consortium, 2001-2008. Open Learning, 24(1), 23-29. doi:10.1080/02680510802627787. (download from: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/02680510802627787 ) This was an interesting article that tackled the creation and growth of the OCW consortium. It wasn't very in-depth (I think it could have been mo...

I thought that the OCW week would be a good week to work on the Researcher Badge for #ioe12 for two reasons: I am a big proponent of Open, especially with openly sharing and iterating through better course materials; and up until recently (#NMC12 to be specific) I wasn't completely clear as to the goals of OCW. Yes, I could have reader the fine "about OCW," but I didn't - my bad :-) In any case, my anecdotal experience about faculty perceptions of open, and openly sharing their own materials in an OCW fashion has been of the "closed" variety, or at best the "copyright boogey man" or the "someone will steal your stuff!" varieties. I've only met a small handful of people at my institution who would just jump on the bandwagon. To this end, I am interested in finding out more about the perceptions of faculty members about OCW, and sharing their own materials in an institutions OCW repository. I would like to know what they think about ...

This past week I also looked at the OCW module of #ioe12. The assigned video was the announcement of the OpenCourseWare project back in 2001 (more than 10 years ago! Who would have thunk it!).  Now, reading about the OCW back then, I got the impression that these were going to be courses  and not just materials. That OCW would be something like what MOOCs are today rather than a publisher or materials. When I first looked at OCW I was really disappointed.  These were not courses!  They were materials, exams, readings and course notes.  Some OCW materials were more "complete"than others, so an interested student (with loads of motivation and resourcefulness)  would be able to  self-study, but some materials were really incomplete and not conducive to self-study.  I saw this as a major #fail. This really colored my perception of OCW. At this year's NMC conference (11 years later!) I did attend a session on OCW and my misconceptions abo...

This morning in the local news there was a story about MITx , an set of courses that are designed to be done through the Web, with no face to face component that people can take for free.  While the course will have an assessment component, if people want the credential of having  taken and passed that course there will be a nominal fee for logging into a secure environment to take additional exams to certify their mastery of the subject. While this isn's really a MOOC, it is an interesting experiment in education.  The resources for these courses will need to be out in the public domain or under a creative commons license in order to make things work in free environment.  Additionally, unlike OCW which I view more as a repository of "things" that a course contains (which you could roll into a full fledged course by yourself), MITx courses will be designed  courses for this environment. Not many details are available yet, but I know that I don...

Αυτή την εβδομάδα στο Change11 MOOC, το θέμα είναι το OCW ή OpenCourseWare. Όπως μάλλον γνωρίζετε το OCW  άρχισε εδώ στα λημέρια μου στο γνωστό MIT και από εκεί επεκτάθηκε σε άλλα πανεπιστήμια, και ένα από αυτά είναι και το δικό μου. Συγκριτικά το δικό μου πανεπιστήμιο δεν είναι στην ίδια κατηγορία όσον αφορά το μέγεθος των πόρων που έχουμε στο δικό μας OCW. Αυτό που αναρωτιόμουν είναι αν στην Ελλάδα, που  πολύ εκπαιδευτική ύλη φαίνεται να είναι public domain. Αν δεν κάνω λάθος τα βιβλία του ΟΕΔΒ είναι δωρεάν στους φοιτητές και είναι public domain, έτσι; Η Ελλάδα θα ήταν καλό περιβάλλον για μια ακαδημαϊκή αναγέννηση, με κάθε ΤΕΙ και ΑΕΙ να έχει κάποιο OCW, και τα βιβλία να διανέμονται δωρεάν και σε μορφή ePub, καθώς φυσικά και άλλα δεδομένα όπως ασκήσεις, σημειώσεις, παρουσιάσεις και άλλα σχετικά. Δεν ξέρω, μπορεί να είμαι πολύ αλτρουιστής και να μου πει κανείς «εδώ η Ελλάδα καίγεται, ο κόσμος άστεγος και πεινασμένος και εσύ μου μιλάς για OCW;» Εντάξει, η Ελλάδα έχει ...

It seems like it's OCW ( open courseware ) week at ChangeMOOC .  When I read the initial description (it referring to OER) I was wondering what sort of readings or thoughts would be seeding this week's discussions. In my initial post for the week I made reference to the paradox of OER (I think it was David Wiley who originally wrote about it), but I am glad that this week is about OCW. I have to say that personally I have a love-hate relationship with OCW.  I love that OCW exists; I think it is an awesome concept because not only does it open up academia, it offer cross-pollination opportunities with other colleagues in other schools (that you don't necessarily know of), it makes courses more transparent to your current and future students, and it offers opportunities for people to self-study if they can't come to your institution or can't afford your institution.  I often look for OCW content in my own disciplines to see what other institutions are doing...