Multilitteratus Incognitus

It is true that, as of this writing, there is much more serious stuff happening in the world today, both in the US and abroad, but this has been percolating in my brain for a while, so I thought I'd jot down some thoughts on one of my favorite topics: the MOOC. Now that I am done with my dissertation, and I've had a little time to rest my brain and refocus on what I want to geek out on, I've wanted to do a retrospective piece on MOOCs. I was going to call it a post-mortem  because I think that the time of the MOOC has passed. Don't get me wrong, I think there is still gas in the tank of companies like Coursera, Edx, and Futurelearn, but I wouldn't call them MOOCs. The innovative pedagogical stuff I saw early on doesn't quite seem to be there these days, with a focus going to AI, massification, and Machine Learning.   In any case, my idea for a post-mortem was particularly poignant because 2022 is the 10th anniversary of the year of the MOOC  (time flies...😮). T...

You don't go to Harvard for the Education. You go to Harvard for the Connections! - someone from my past (I don't remember who). The other day a long-distance friend and colleague posted an interesting blog post pondering (or positing?) that Social and Cultural capital are the main problem in online education . A very engaging twitter thread and discussion ensued (which I am having trouble locating at the moment), but I thought I'd let the dust settle a bit and collect my thoughts on the matter first.  It is a little self-serving too because I wanted to get back into the habit of writing and this seemed like a good opportunity.  As I was thinking about where to start untangling this thread the quote at the beginning of this post came to mind†. As I was thinking about this I interrogated some of my educational experiences, both undergraduate, and graduate, and free-range learning (like MOOCs).  Most of my education was residential in nature. Although I do prefer ...

Closure screen on Open2Study Last night, while browsing through my Reddit subscriptions, I noticed on one of the EdTech Reddits that Open2Study is now closed, and that the site redirects to Open Universities Australia (which was the parent entity).  I was a little in disbelief, but since I had not visited O2S in a while I thought I'd check it out with my own two eyes.  Lo and behold, the site was closed (see screencap above) and it was directing people to OU Australia. On the one hand this wasn't surprising.  I had completed most of the courses that I was interested in within the first year of operation (2013?).  I did check back periodically to see if they had added anything new, but the course offerings seemed to stagnate. I don't think that the platform added any new courses past that initial batch in 2013.  With this stagnation it does seem normal that the platform would close.  However, it does seem a little weird that no announcement was m...

Time-vortex initiated... loading Week 5 of EL30 ;-) eL30's topic in Week 5 was all about resources, and specifically OER.  This is a fun topic to return to from time to time to discuss, especially now given that my state seems to have taken it a step further by having a Massachusetts Open Education initiative which my university is promoting. There were a few things that came up as interesting in the interview, some newer to me, and some things that have come up in previous posts about OER. One interesting comment that came from the discussion is when Stephen mentioned during the chat that he is more reluctant to share a resource if it goes through a vetting/accrediting/QA process; not because he doesn't like quality, but because someone can just say "this resource doesn't deserve to be shared". I found this quite interesting. It's not that I disagree with Stephen, I too would be reluctant to share in an official capacity any work of mine if it meant t...

Greetings fellow three-point-oh'ers (or is it just fellow eLearners?) This past week in eLearning 3.0 (Week 2, aka 'the cloud'). This week's guest was Tony Hirsch, and what was discussed was the cloud, and specifically Docker.  Before I get into my (riveting) thoughts on the cloud, let me go back  to Week 0 (two weeks ago) and reflect a little on the thoughts I jotted down on my retrieved post-it note. So, in the live session a couple of weeks ago (it's recorded if you want to go back and see it), Siemens said something along the lines of "what information abundance consumes is attention". This really struck me as both a big "aha!" as well as a "well, d'uh! why hadn't it occurred to me already? D'oh!". There has been a lot said over the past few years about how people don't read anymore (they skim), and how bad that is.  This ties into "what learners want" (a phrase I've heard countless times on-cam...

Many years ago, maybe around 16 years ago, I was sitting in the office of my computer science major advisor, getting my academic plan for next semester signed off on.  My computer science program was actually an offshoot of the mathematics department, and until recent years (2003?) they were one and the same.  My advisor, while looking at my transcript, noticed that (on average) I was doing better in language courses rather than my computer science courses; which was technically true, but many courses designated as CS courses (and ones that were required for my degree) were really math courses, so you need to do a deeper dive to see what I was doing better in. I never really forgot what he said next.  He said I should switch major; and it was odd that he didn't offer any suggestions as to how to improve†...  Being a bit stubborn (and relatively close to graduation) I doubled down and completed my major requirements (ha!).  During this chat I told him that...

This past week the web was abuzz with new research to come out of Harvard and MIT on cheating identification in MOOCs, specifically xMOOCs hosted on the edX platform, but I suspect that any platform that collects appropriate analytics could see this used.  The title of the paper is Detecting and Preventing "Multiple-Account" Cheating in Massive Open Online Courses and it's an interesting read. I find the ways of crunching data collected by web-servers as a way of predicting human behavior fascinating.  While I am more of a qualitative researcher at heart, I do appreciate the ways in which we can use math, data, and analytics to derive patterns. That said, my main argument with the authors of the article are not the methods they use, but rather the actual utility of such an algorithm.  The authors write that CAMEO (Copying Answers using Multiple Existences Online)† is a potential threat to MOOCs because CAMEO is highly accessible. Anyone can create additional ac...

Recently I read an article on Your Training Edge which aims to correct misconceptions surrounding MOOCs. The title of this particular post, and I guess myth that they tried to correct, was " MOOCs Aren’t Interactive, So There’s No Real Learning Taking Place ". The basic idea in this misconception is really preposterous.  I don't know when interactive became synonymous with learning , but it is clearly a flawed concept.  Yes, interactivity can aid in learning, but just because something isn't interactive it doesn't mean that learning is taking place, and vice versa - if something is interactive it doesn't mean that learning is taking place.  I can think of a lot of cases where there isn't interactivity, but learning happens never the less. Three examples that come to mind are: self-paced eLearning, while you might have some  interactivity (matching games, clicking "next" on the player, and so on), this interactivity is really token interact...

Udemy is one of those platforms that frequently gets lumped into the "MOOC provider" category. Perhaps, these days, with the term being anything you want it to be, Udemy fits into this category.  Over the past few weeks I've been experimenting with their courses to see what Udemy is all about.  originally (a year or so ago), when I first went to Udemy I experienced sticker-shock.  The courses (or at least those one the homepage) were not free. This was not something that I was expecting to see from a MOOC platform. That said, this time around, I fished around and found six free courses.  Three were more like professional development workshops, traditional self-paced learning, and three were created by academics.  The three more academic courses were Ancient Greek Religion , Intercultural Communication , and a political science course on American Democracy . From a motivational perspective, I assigned up for these courses because they were free, and they were...

Cookie cutters: detriment to creativity, or fuel to the creative fire? Last week, while I was updating something on LinkedIn, I saw one of my colleagues post a link to a post by the eLearning Brothers called The Top 10 Best eLearning Game Templates . I am generally not a fan of such list-posts, but every now and again I come across something really interesting.  I usually don't teach courses on CBT, WBT or other self-paced eLearning.  It's an interesting topic, but it really isn't my cup of tea, so I wouldn't voluntarily agree to teach an entire semester of such a course. In any case, last semester I was peer reviewing a colleague's course (and to some extent co-teaching it because I had a hand in grading and content and assignment creation), which just so happened to be in Multimedia.  The particular spin that this course took was to use multimedia to create a self-paced course. So, with this fresh in my mind, with the discussions we had last week in #rhizo14...

It's been a whirlwind tour in mobimooc this year.  Week 2 is almost done (I count my weeks by a 5-day weekday, rather than 7 days) and only one more week to go! I feel that I have not been as active in MobiMOOC this year as I was in the previous year.  Perhaps it's because MobiMOOC is only half of the duration of last year's MOOC.  It would be interesting to see how often I posted last year (per week) and this year :-) In any case, what has come up this year (that I think wasn't there last year) is a discussion on the nuances of mLearning and what constitutes mLearning, as compared to other types of learning (I call these  x Learning) such as uLearning (ubiquitous), eLearning (electronic), oLearning (online),  iLearning (internet) and so on. Here are some questions and points that were posed to spark discussion on the topic: Does M-learning start when E-learning comes to the end? E-learning doesn't feed our needs thus M-learning were born to fill the gap? ...

OK, this one goes back a while (back to September as a matter of fact!) It's been sitting in my RSS starred items folder for a while waiting for me to do something with it. For the longest period of time I did not know what to do with it. The reason for this is that what the author writes seems so bleeping obvious (with the exception of the made up term "we-learning"). I remember back in the day, when I was a wee MBA student taking a course in Knowledge Management (sidebar: just looked at my transcript - wow, that was Spring of 2006! it seems so long ago), we spoke of these issues of capturing knowledge within the company and how we can capitalize on it, either through formal or informal means. The books and cases we used were anywhere from less than a year old to things that went back a decade (or more). The key thing here is that the idea of using informal learning, looking to your fellow coworker for knowledge, is an old thing and I am surprised that learning speci...