Multilitteratus Incognitus

This past weekend a story came across my slashdot feed titled  Software Goes Through Beta Testing. Should Online College Courses?  I don't often see educational news on slashdot so it piqued my interest. Slashdot links to an EdSurge article where Coursera courses are described as going through beta testing by volunteers (unpaid labor...) The beta tests cover things such as: ... catching mistakes in quizzes and pointing out befuddling bits of video lectures, which can then be clarified before professors release the course to students. Fair enough, these are things that we tend to catch in developing our own (traditional) online courses as well, and that we fix or update in continuous offering cycles.   The immediate comparison, quite explicitly, in this edsurge article is the comparison of xMOOCs to traditional online courses.  The article mentions rubrics like Quality Matters and SUNY's open access OSCQR ("oscar") rubric for online 'quality'. One S...

The case of MOOC standards (as well as MOOC sustainability) is something that keeps coming back to me as a topic of pondering.  I read about it in other blogs.  Then, I want to respond to some of these articles, and bounce off some ideas, but I lose motivation and decide "m'eh" - this topics isn't much of interest.  Then, a little while later, my interest on the topic rekindles.  I thought it would be best to at least write something to keep this conversation on quality going (it might even motivate me to write more in depth...or collaborate with some colleagues to produce something more "academic"). In any case, the most recent thing I read about MOOC Quality, and what that might look like is from eCampus News from about a month ago (something sticking out in my Pocket to-read list). The article points to recent research published in IRRODL where the Quality Matters rubric was used to keep the quality under control in a MOOC. I haven't read the ...

Classroom space, in second life A while back I really wanted to develop a course (for the instructional design program I teach in every now and again) on environmental factors of learning.  I know that the topic might seem nebulous but I think that's where the strength of the course would come from†.  We could examine not only  technologies which we use to facilitate our learning (and how they promote and don't promote learning, or certain kinds of learning), but also look at learning from a cross-disciplinary perspective including room design, social factors, architecture, technologies, learner attitudes, and so on. This idea is still in the nascent stages while I am working on my doctorate‡.  That said - despite the busy schedule this semester - I decided to dive into  #NR001PL , a cMOOC looking at Personal Learning Environments which is hosted by the National Research Council of Canada (where Stephen Downes works).  The course is interesting in t...

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...

Here it is! The final week of BlendKit2012! I know it is only a 5 week MOOC, but it seems to have gone by pretty quickly! The topic of this week, as with any well designed course, is evaluation - or: how do you know that your learning intervention (in this case designing a blended course) has worked and your learners walked away with the knowledge they need to be successful. The reading this week centered around this topic of evaluation. The questions to ponder are as follows: How will you know whether your blended learning course is sound prior to teaching it?  How will you know whether your teaching of the course was effective once it has concluded?  With which of your trusted colleagues might you discuss effective teaching of blended learning courses? Is there someone you might ask to review your course materials prior to teaching your blended course? How will you make it easy for this colleague to provide helpful feedback?  How are “quality” and “success” in b...