Multilitteratus Incognitus

The more I read chapter in  Macro-Level Learning through Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs): Strategies and Predictions for the Future , the more I am starting to feel like Anton Ego from the animated movie Ratatouille ;-)  It's not that I am aiming to write harsh reviews of the stuff I read, but I kind of feel like the anticipation I have for reading some published things about MOOCs just aren't met with the appropriate level of satisfaction from reading what I am reading. This time I am reviewing chapter 7, which is titled  Beyond the Phenomenon: Assessment in Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) .  The abstract is as follows: MOOC course offerings and enrollments continue to show an upward spiral with an increasing focus on completion rates. The completion rates of below 10 percent in MOOCs pose a serious challenge in designing effective pedagogical techniques and evolving assessment criterion for such a large population of learners. With more institutions ...

It's the final stretch of 2014! This makes it my fourth year in exploring MOOCs - boy does time fly!  When I started off with LAK11 I was really just looking for ways to continue learning for free.  While I do get a tuition benefit at work, this also involves standard semesters of 13 weeks, getting work-release time (since online learning isn't covered by the benefit) and retaining the motivation to keep going through a predefined course and syllabus.  Even when MobiMOOC happened and we formed the MobiMOOC research team I really didn't foresee that the, oddly named, MOOC would catch on fire the way it did.  At the time I was eager to get some initial thoughts together on how to put together a MOOC (now they are called cMOOCs) and put together a Great Big MOOC Book , with others, that was a right mix of research and practice.  Since the MOOC has really expanded a lot over the years, with many different things being called a "MOOC" the original idea might be be...

Well, it's the end of the week (or the beginning if you are following Western conventions with the odd behavior of calling "Sunday" the beginning of the week), grading for my course, for this week, is done, and it's time to see what I missed on Rhizo14 while I was tending to other things.  One of the things that we are putting together (in addition to the long autoethnography for #rhizo14) is this other research, which I would call Delphi based in its methodology, on why we take MOOCs, why we participate in them, and why we stick, or not stick, to them. I thought that this would be something interesting to participate in since I am not sure I've recorded why I've been participating in MOOCs (as you will note, the MOOC tag is the biggest one on this blog). The other epithets used online, thus far, for those who keep engaging in MOOCs is MOOCaholic .  I don't know if I like that epithet because it doesn't necessarily describe me right at this momen...

Yesterday morning I was catching up on some #cfhe12 blog posts by Bryan Alexander (who I have not seen in a MOOC in ages), a blog post about d efining MOOCs  by Rolin Moe ,  and my colleague Rebecca who writes about the ease and usefulness in MOOCs†. First, let me respond to Rolin's points (since I happened to read his blog post first). There are lots of people looking at the future of academic publishing, pushing for an open movement. Some academic journals have gone open, but the majority of journals carry a high price tag which only exists as price opportunistic for educational institutions (and some rare corporations and organizations). Yet academic journals are part of the lifeblood of scientific research, especially for soft sciences (such as education). By only working with open resources, a cMOOC cuts many of these empirical, peer-reviewed research works out of its circulation, having instead to pull from free resources that often lack academic rigor. For a...

It's quite interesting, but the topic of MOOCs and accreditation keeps coming up :-) The post that prompted this blog post came from a post I saw on MobiMOOC today regarding information assessment and recognition of success .  In MobiMOOC 2012 one of the new things that is baked into the course is the awarding of badges , with an eye toward Mozilla's Open Badges. There are currently three types of badges: Wonderful Participant (for signing up in the course) Advanced learner (for participating in at least 2 topics in MobiMOOC) Memorable Collaborator (for being active in 3 topics) and writing a project overview for an mLearning project) I've already achieved #1 by being there, and I think I will most likely get #2.  #3 might be a little more problematic since I don't have much time to think of a new mLearning project, and I don't feel comfortable just picking from my bag of existing mLearning ideas (even though I haven't articulated them before, or implem...

One of the first things to deal with when tackling any topic is quantifying what we are talking about.  Since this is MobiMOOC, one of the key terms that ought to come up in the discussion is what exactly is mobile learning?  This discussion did indeed come up yesterday ( see forum here ). Let me just say that mLearning definitions are probably incomplete and they are subject to an ever evolving understanding of what constitutes  mobility and  learning .  Initial definitions were very hardware-centric and hardware-specific, and chances are the further back you go, the more hardware-centric and specific they are. This is fine because those definitions comes from a point in time when mLearning was the new kid on the block and we probably looked at demonstrable instances of mobile usage, and that happened to be mobile phones and PDAs. Clive asks some pretty interesting questions (and these are questions that I've heard in the past). If I use my laptop on a...

I just noticed on the Google group for mobimooc that my MRT colleagues ( Micheal and Rebecca ) have posted their guides on how they will be participating in MobiMOOC this year, so I thought that it might be a good idea to do the same since mobiMOOC just started, and it's good to set expectations ;-) I have to say that I generally don't come back for "seconds" once a MOOC is done. Once the course is done, I don't feel the need to come back for the second iteration, but MobiMOOC is different for me.  Last year I got a certificate for  being a memorable participant in the MOOC, so I felt that I should be coming back this year and reprising the role ;-) Heck, not that we have badges, it's even more incentive :-)  The other reason for coming back is that my fellow MRT members are going to be here, and this is a group of people that I've been able to communicate, learn, and co-research with for more than one year ; this is pretty amazing considering that when...

Here is a preview of the facilitator lineup for MobiMOOC12 (straight from the MobiMOOC group!) With the start of the course still two months away, our grand group of   facilitators was completed last week and here are the guides-on-the-side   for all the upcoming mobile learning topics (in completely random order).   All of us cover 4 continents and 9 different mobile learning topics: Mobile learning theory/pedagogy : Geoff< http://www.linkedin.com/in/geoffstead >(Stead) is a mobile massive brain from Cambridge, UK, with an enormous   amount of zest and creativity. Who better to provide an overview of mobile   learning theories and pedagogies then his creative mind? Corporate learning : Amit < http://www.linkedin.com/in/gargamit100 > (Garg)   from India has inspired companies to go mobile based on strong business   plans, goal oriented design and intuitive learning. He shares what he knows   with all that want to hear. Amit is a true e...

Well, the BonkOpen MOOC is almost over, I earned my badge (seen on the right) and in the process picked up some new knowledge, information, skills, and professional contacts! At the same time I was able to see Blackboard Learn in action as a host for a massive online course. I think, that by and large, the MOOC was a good one, and the organizers and coordinators were responsive to the people who attended the MOOC and modified it, as the MOOC progressed, based on the feedback of the participants. There were a number of good things about the MOOC, but also a few mis-steps.  Here are some lessons I learned about using an LMS for a MOOC. No need for introductions . In a MOOC there are just way too many people to make introductions feasible.  The introduction isn't for the speaker to say who they are, but rather for the hearer to know who the speaker is.  This wasn't accomplished with the introductions in this MOOC.  The introductions were setup like a "normal" 15-...

It's week 2 in FSLT, and the topic of this week is group participation. One of the things mentioned this week by the facilitators are the roles that people take in group work , which was quite interesting, as I could see  people in my past group work experience taking on those roles consciously or subconsciously. In the MOOC forums there is quite a lively discussion this week (as there was last week), which got me thinking. One of the things that I've been pondering is the mode of participation.  In MOOCs like Change11 and CCK11 the main mode of participation seems to have been Blogging, and aggregation of those blog posts through a daily newsletter.  Other modes included tweeting, posting on delicious, and using the basic commenting systems on gRSShopper.  It is true, at least for me, that in these two MOOCs I did not miss the discussion board element and I fully embraced blogging (and commenting on other people's blogs) as a way to participate and follow the lear...

This past week in Change11 we had George Veletsianos as the facilitator.  It was a pretty nice week, I really enjoyed the three articles he posted as readings. It seems like most of the posts in the daily (the few posts) were about MIT and Harvard and EdX....yaaawwwwnnnnn.... Seriously, isn't EdX just a continuation of the OpenCourseWare movement that MIT started?  Let's just call it OpenCourseWare 2.0 and move on.  I'll have to read some more reactions about EdX in order to write a more cogent and informed response, so I will quit my ranting about it right...about....now! So, back to Change and Veletsianos.  The readings were quite interesting.  What really stood out for me was that faculty aren't luddites; some are, but in general they are not - they are curious.  They are cautious about the use of SNS, and how the Home/Work/Professional environments collide.  I know many people that don't care about the Home/Work/Professional collisions and...

I had come across Jupidu's post on Sensemaking in a MOOC a while back, but I haven't had much time to respond to it just yet (until now I guess ;-)  ).  I was actually thinking of my participation in MOOCs in general; as well as the two MOOCs I am now participating in - those being Change11 and DS106.  I was actually thinking of points 1, 2, 4 and 5 in specifically and I thought I would do a bit of compare and contrast between the two: Sensemaking works around identity creation – in every environment f2f or virtual I’m building my identity and this “self” is in continuous interaction with the environment and with the other learners as well. Sensemaking works retrospective – I’m making sense out of experiences reflecting about them, as I’m doing it now with this article I want to write. And therefore sensemaking is influenced by my memory of situations. Sensemaking is social – of course it is in the Mooc! I’m a kind of aware of some the learners who participate in th...

With 2011 almost gone, I thought I would write a bit about the major educational venture of 2011 (at least for me), the Massive Online Open Course (or MOOC).  Last year, at this time of year, if you told me that I would be spending a lot of time in MOOCs I would call you crazy.  While I had heard of MOOCs in 2009 and 2010, I was too busy with a capstone project (for my Instructional Design degree) and my comprehensive exams (for Applied Linguistics) to pay too much attention to PLENK and CCK09. With formal schooling done (at least for now) and with no courses to take at the university I decided to experiment with MOOCs.   In January a friend and colleague, @cdetorres, recommended LAK11 - Learning Analytics. This was to be my first MOOC. It was quite interesting, I did learn quite a lot, and it just highlighted that I was interested in a topic, learning analytics, that I hadn't spent a lot of time pondering. The course was quite fast paced; a lot of things to do, in w...

The other day I was thinking of the research methods class that I may be teaching in the spring (as of yet there are only two students signed up) and I was reading a research article for the literature review for the MobiMOOC paper that the MRT is working on.  In this article quite a few things correlated, but I they didn't necessarily cause each other. To be fair, the researchers did not claim that there was causation, but I thought that this article would be a good one to analyze, especially for people new to critical review of research literature.

This paper seems to have made the rounds while I was away from blogging last week, but I thought it would be worthwhile  posting it on my blog just the same :-) The second paper of the MRT (mobiMOOC research team) is now available through the  International Review of Research in Online and Distance Learning (IRRODL) and is titled " Using mLearning and MOOCs to understand chaos, emergence, and complexity in education ."  Here's the abstract: In this paper, we look at how the massive open online course (MOOC) format developed by connectivist researchers and enthusiasts can help analyze the complexity, emergence, and chaos at work in the field of education today. We do this through the prism of a MobiMOOC, a six-week course focusing on mLearning that ran from April to May 2011. MobiMOOC embraced the core MOOC components of self-organization, connectedness, openness, complexity, and the resulting chaos, and, as such, serves as an interesting paradigm for new educational ...

The MobiMOOC research team has been working on our third paper, further analyzing aspects of MOOCs, and MobiMOOC in specific.  Our forthcoming paper tackles the topic of emotive language usage in MOOC discussions as a predictor of continued, or future, participation in the course. We are currently in the process of going over and refining the paper, but I don't want to give away the punchline before it's done in its totality :-) In any case, I've taken the lead on this project to see which journal we can publish our findings in.and I have found a journal whose theme is online learning and asynchronous networks, which fits in with MOOCs and MOOC pedagogy (although, to be honest I don't know how much MOOC pedagogy there is out there...perhaps something to put our heads together about). Anyway, I was looking over the author submission guidelines to see what sort of format they wish to have us submit our paper in terms of citations, footnotes* and text formatting; and ...

Since Week 8 of Change11 has yet to start (materials seem no where to be found) I thought it would be worth going back and commenting on my previous post on MOOC summative evaluations . The question posed by Alan Selig was how to get summative evaluations from MOOC participants when you have dip-in-jump-out  model for most MOOCs; I say most  because at least the language MOOC I will be designing won't be so much of a dip-in-jump-out -people could, but if you are a true n00b in the language   you might have problems if you skip a week since language is cumulative. In any case, my first step would be to ask do we need an assessment and why?   Now, just to be clear, I am not saying that we don't need assessments in MOOCs, but rather we need to rethink the assessment (as both Mark and Jane commented on in my previous post).  What do we aim to accomplish with an assessment? Is it for us (organizers) or for the them (the participants)? What form ...

Yesterday while taking the train back home from work I was catching up with Change11 related blogs.  Two of them caught my eye and sparked my imagination (or perhaps cognitive process is a better word...in any case it got me thinking). First I read Tony Bates' initial summary of the week he facilitated , and then Jenny's response to him on selfish blogging . Tony writes (and this is not the only thing he writes so read his entire post): There could be all kinds of reasons for the shortage of comments on this week’s topic, but I was more struck by the form in which they occurred. Participants did not comment directly to my post for this week, but within their own blogs. I call this the syndrome of the selfish blogger. We all do this. If we have something interesting to say, we’d rather say it on our own web site than someone else’s (it would be nice though if the post was also copied to the site that originated the topic). I had to go and cull all the comments from the #Ch...

I was reading Micheal's blog the other night and I realized that the Conference Proceedings for mLearn 2011 are now up!  You can download them from the Conference website , or you can read them on Scribd (see bellow) In other news, it seems like the MobiMOOC research team is big in China :-) We were contacted yesterday by PhD students (under the direction of their advisor) to see if we would consent to have our mLearn paper translated into Chinese for publication in a core Chinese academic journal - this is both a great honor and über cool! mLearn 2011 (BeiJing) Conference Proceedings

Congrats to everyone in the MobiMOOC research group for getting the  Best Paper Award at the mLearn 2011 conference!  In addition to myself, the team is made up of  (alphabetical order):   Sean C. Abajian ,  Inge deWaard ,  Michael Sean Gallagher ,  Rebecca Hogue ,  Nilgün Özdamar Keskin , and  Osvaldo Rodriguez  . A big thank you to Rebecca, Michael and  Nilgun for representing our team at mLearn in Beijing (wish I could have gone but oh well, looking forward to meeting the rest of the team in person one of these days :-)  )  I wonder if the presentation was video recorded. Inge has uploaded our paper at Academia.edu for anyone who is interested and the conference slides up on SlideShare (link bellow). I have to say that I really enjoyed working collaboratively with the MobiMOOC research team both on this project and on projects we are currently working on. While there is still place for solo-research activity, I t...