Multilitteratus Incognitus

We are now in Week 4 (of 5!) of BlendKit2012 and the subject of the week is content and assessments . The questions to ponder for this week are as follows: In what experiences (direct or vicarious) will you have students participate during your blended learning course?  In what ways do you see these experiences as part of the assessment process? Which experiences will result in student work that you score?  How will you present content to students in the blended learning course you are designing? Will students encounter content only in one modality (e.g., face-to-face only), or will you devise an approach in which content is introduced in one modality and elaborated upon in the other? What will this look like?  Will there be a consistent pattern to the presentation of content, introduction of learning activities, student submission of assignments, and instructor feedback (formal and informal) in your blended learning course? How can you ensure that students experien...

Well, yesterday afternoon I got fired up when listening to the final panel discussion of the day at Sloan-C's annual ALN conference. The panel was titled "Evolution or Revolution? What’s Happening with “Traditional” Online Learning?" and I have broken down my thoughts by speaker. Jose Cruz (The Education Trust, US) This was a pretty interesting speaker, and he made a good point about putting "learning" back in "online learning". The speaker pointed out that governments was accountability, higher graduation rates, and, of course, do it with less money. This speaker,  mostly focused on access to higher education and higher education completion along ethnic and socioeconomic lines. Beyond that the speaker focused a lot on the numbers of people, along different ethnic and racial demographics, that have a BA. It seemed to me that the basic assumption was that the BA degree was a necessity - period. There was no interrogation of why a BA is a requiremen...

Well, another 6 week MOOC started this week, CFHE12 (which I keep wanting to spell a CHFE12 for some reason) with George Siemens and company.  This seems quite interesting, and it gives me an opportunity to check out the D2L environment in action, considering that  our campus could have been a D2L campus, but we went with Blackboard instead. In any case, one of the first things for this week is to introduce yourself in the forum. I didn't do this because in my experience in massive environments you get a boatload of "hello"s or "introduction"s or "Hello from____" threads which are hard to distinguish who is coming in from where at the end of the day.  This might work in smaller group settings (this type of intro activity using course fora) but, for me at least, it fails massively in a MOOC. OK, I am poo-poo-ing this approach, but I don't have something to take it's place right away, just file this under: "things to work out in MOOC pedag...

 It's week 3 of 5 in BlendKit2012, and this week's readings are on the topic of assessment (a pretty important topic if you ask me!). Thus far the contributions of my fellow participants have been pretty interesting to read as well (keep it up! :-)  ). In any case, this week's readings give the reader a quick overview of the testing types that an online environment affords, talks (briefly) about the importance of defining expectations (i.e. setting up grading rubrics) and  talks a bit about informal assessments.  This week's questions to keep in the back of your head are as follows: How much of the final course grade do you typically allot to testing? How many tests/exams do you usually require? How can you avoid creating a “high stakes” environment that may inadvertently set students up for failure/cheating?  What expectations do you have for online assessments? How do these expectations compare to those you have for face-to-face assessments? Are you ...

Well, my first xMOOC is now complete! For this first time around in my xMOOC explorations I chose a coursera course on Gamification.  This was a good choice because the video lectures were engaging! It turns out that the instructor has a law degree, so I guess his great presentation skills are now easily explained ;-) There were a few highlights and a few dim-lights to the course.  As far as the highlights go, as I said the video lectures were quite good! I really did enjoy listening, and seeing, the video presentations each week. Kevin Werbach was a great speaker, and while I think that the  lectures were prepared, he didn't sound like he was reading a prompter, in other words he was natural and not robotic. This made the material flow pretty well. I also liked that there were about 2 hours worth of videos each week, this feels more like a "real" course than just having some small videos to watch.  I do realize that this is discipline specific and that some discip...

BlendKit, prepare to have your mind blown! OK, I am a exaggerating a bit, but I am going to come to this MOOC from a non-traditional approach. I've been thinking about the DIY activities, and I have to say that the DYI tools (4th column, DIY project deliverables) are pretty nifty; not just for blended learning, but also for instructional design purposes in general. Now, I don't think I will have a ton of time to complete all DIY deliverables; and, considering that the course I am working with is only a proposal which may, or may not become a full course†, I think it's best to not spend a whole lot of time on a specific course until it's approved to run (given other competing time issues). In any case, my guinea pig course is a course on Mobile Learning that I developed (at least in syllabus form) in the past year. The funny thing is that I originally conceived of this course as a blended course; however due to business factors (more online students interested in t...

Yesterday I was reading the materials for Week 2 of BlenkKit , which are adapted from Handbook of Emerging Technologies for Learning by George Siemens and Peter Tittenberger†.  While the entire reading was quite interesting, what I latched onto were the roles of the educator in this chapter which consisted of: Atelier Learning (Seely Brown, 2006) Network Administrator (Fisher, nd) Concierge Learning (Bonk, 2007) Curatorial Learning (Siemens, 2007) From the experiences I've had in my own personal background I can say that Atelier Learning and Curatorial Learning are what appeal to me as roles for an educator, not separate, but some combination of both.  Think of a museum and an a master artist's workshop. An apprentice might be in an artist's workshop (atelier), but at the same time, some curated work needs to be available for the apprentice to reference and learn from. This way you have some examples  but you are not constrained by them . This Week's questi...

With the gamification almost over (this coming week is the final week), the Human Computer Interaction course on Coursera is just starting! Back in the day (2003-ish) I was finishing off my undergraduate degree in computer science and one of my final courses was a graduate course on User Interface Design, which I really enjoyed! I liked the subject matter, and the course was taught by a professor that I really liked (he was quite talented!) .  In any case, I guess that about high time that I got back into it! Right off the bat I noticed three things: 1. There are fewer videos each week as compared to gamification; 2. Scott Klemmer is quite different from Kevin Werback in presentation style; 3. There are three levels of certification in the course. This course runs for 8 weeks as opposed to 5 in gamification, and each week the videos seem to run for about an hour in total (as opposed to 2 in gamification). I actually didn't mind the 2 hours of video each week in gamificati...

This morning, while commuting to work, I was catching up on some blog posts from fellow #blendkit2012 participants and I came across a blog post titled Is blended the same as half-distance ? but Andres Norberg. I was originally just going to comment on the blog post itself, but the response was getting quite lengthy, so I converted into a blog post. Anders asks: If traditional face-to-face education is combined with distance education, what happens? Savings of classroom space and lecturing time? Better enrollment on campus due to increased flexibility in scheduling for students? Extra learning efficiency by using modern tools? More stimulating classes? A sense of being modern and up-to-date by enriching a classroom culture with digital tools? All of the above? It's interesting, to consider f2f education combining with distance education, but, when it comes down to it, what does that combination really mean?  For example, our campus has a lot of  web-enhanced courses , ...

This is it! The final week of MobiMOOC is upon us!  I have to say that this MOOC really passed by so quick that it was really hard to keep up with it :-) Last year's mobimooc seemed like it was much longer than 6 weeks (in a good way), and this year's mobimooc seemed shorter than the 3 weeks that it runs. Comparatively, I think last year I joined the mobimooc with the intention to be a moderately active participant, and I ended up being "memorably" active, while this year I started with the intention of being memorably active...but I guess I'll have to settle for moderately active :-) .  There were a few issues, for me anyway, with this year's mobimooc - and most of them were around scheduling.  In April and May (original MobiMOOC) courses are near the end (or have already ended), so there is a little more head space to participate in the MOOC. In September, however, the story is a bit different. Courses are just starting, there is an initial crazyness as...