Students have more choice in how they choose to pursue learning. MOOCs, open courseware, and traditional courses all offer different opportunities. But how do we recognize achievements, skills, or competencies across formal and informal learning opportunities? Digital badges offer a new common currency for learning. Badges are visual representations of learning that explain what was learned and provide evidence of student work. Purdue University developed Passport, an alternative to the traditional LMS, which presents learning activities as challenges where students can earn badges. This presentation will explore how Passport has been used and plans for making the technology available to instructors everywhere. Kyle Bowen, Director of Informatics, Purdue University
Tuesday / Feb 5th, 2013 10:30 AM - 11:15 AM Source and Links Available At
President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) / Tentative Agenda
November 30, 2012
National Academy of Sciences
2101 Constitution Avenue NW
Agenda as of November 2, 2012
9:00 am Welcome from PCAST Co-Chairs
John Holdren, Assistant to the President for Science and Technology; Director, Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP); Co-Chair, PCAST
Eric Lander, Co-Chair, PCAST
9:05 am PCAST Study Update: Networking & Information Technology R&D (NITRD) 2012 Study
David E. Shaw, NITRD Working Group Co-Chair and PCAST Member
Susan L. Graham, NITRD Working Group Co-Chair
Peter Lee, NITRD Working Group Co-Chair
9:30 am Massively Open Online Courses & STEM Education
Sebastian Thrun, CEO, Udacity (accepted) Daphne Koller, Co-founder, Coursera; Professor, Stanford University (accepted) Anant Agarwal, President, edEx; Professor, MIT (accepted) Frank DiGiovanni, Director, Training Readiness and Strategy, Department of Defense (accepted)
Open badges: this concept can be explosive in an educational environment. During this session, Mozilla will lay bare the successes, challenges, and failures of the Open Badge Infrastructure (OBI) project during the last year. We'll also cover our OBI dogfooding initiative, Webmaker badges, and how learning outcomes can be overshadowed by a badge-zealous public. Audiences are vital to our conversation, and we encourage as much interaction and discussion as possible during this session. We look forward to hearing your questions, comments, and concerns about open badges.
Tuesday / Feb 5th, 2013 / 10:30 AM - 11:15 AM MT
Carla Casilli, Webmaker Badges + Content Team Lead, Mozilla Foundation
Sunny Lee Open Badges Project Lead, Mozilla Foundation
Groups not traditionally in the degree-granting realm are upending how (and by whom) credit is issued. We will look at how programs outside higher education—as well as some pioneering projects in the postsecondary sphere—are adopting microcredentials and badge-empowered learning. Digital badges are more nimble than their cousins, diplomas and degrees. They allow sharing of evidence of skills and knowledge acquired through a much wider range of life activity, at a more granular level, and at a pace that keeps up with individuals who are always learning, even outside the classroom. What is the real opportunity in education for badges, and how do digital badges peacefully coexist with grades, transcripts, and degrees? The speaker will draw on firsthand experience with groups like the Smithsonian, YMCA of Greater New York, the New York City Department of Education, Yale University, and EDUCAUSE. Jonathan Finkelstein / Founder and Executive Producer > LearningTimes
Tuesday / Feb 5th, 2013 / 1:30 PM - 2:15 PM MT Source and Links Available
This webinar will present ideas and examples of assessing deeper learning in open online learning communities as well as game and simulation-based learning experiences based on eight essential practices. The practices were surfaced by a writing team developing a theoretical foundation for badges in a project linked to the Open Badge Infrastructure. The session will define deeper learning and outline a case for elevating formative, performance-based methods in technology-enhanced assessments. A technical discussion of big data analysis of game and simulation click tracks will include introduction to tools and methods used to mine for complex patterns where time, virtual space, and digital affordances combine to complicate the process of inferring what users know and can do based on their actions in digital spaces.
When: November 30, 2012 9am PT / 10am MT / 11am CT / 12pm ET
Register for: SIGGS Webinar: Assessment of Learning with Badges
Presenter info: Dr. David Gibson, Chief Scientist for Pragmatic Solutions, received his Ed.D. from the University of Vermont in Leadership and Policy Studies in 1999, and works as an educational researcher, professor, learning scientist and innovator at local, state and national levels of education. Dr. Gibson’s research focuses on complex systems analysis and modeling of education, games and simulations in teacher education, web applications and the future of learning, and the use of technology to personalize education via cognitive modeling, design and implementation. His articles and books on games and simulations in learning follow from his role as creator of simSchool, a classroom flight simulator for preparing educators, and eFolio an online performance-based assessment system.
Updated: Saturday, 24 Nov 2012, 10:40 AM EST
Published : Saturday, 24 Nov 2012, 9:32 AM EST
BLOOMINGTON, Ind. (AP) -- Students from around the world could participate in classes at Indiana University via the Web under the university's aggressive new online education model.
The $8 million move to massive open online courses, or MOOCs, will offer educational badges to students who complete the courses and master certain skills but don't enroll in degree programs.
IU President Michael McRobbie says the new program, which replaces its School of Continuing Studies, will allow the university "to `project' itself beyond the walls of the campuses, and equally importantly, the walls of the classroom of the 21st century."
IU Online will create Web-based undergraduate and graduate degree programs and provide online options for high-enrollment undergraduate courses to reduce the time it takes students to complete degrees.
The Indianapolis Business Journal reports (http://bit.ly/ROxqND) that IU expects to increase its online undergraduate degree and certificate programs in areas including business, technology and sciences. Every IU graduate-level professional school will develop at least one online degree or certificate by next fall.
Online learning isn't new. But the concept of the badges is drawing attention.
While the badges could expand revenue for traditional colleges, they could deal a blow to online for-profit educators such as Carmel-based ITT Educational Services Inc.
Indiana Higher Education Commissioner Teresa Lubbers said MOOCs will clearly be "at the front and center" of higher education discussions as states look for more ways to educate students.
CourseTalk is a place for students to share their experiences with MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) and discover new courses they'll love. We list the amazing free college-level courses listed on platforms such as Udacity, Coursera, and edX.
During this two-week seminar we will explore digital badges from concept through to implementation. The seminar will focus on the possible pedagogies and technology required for implementing digital badges. We will also take a critical look at the current state of digital badges with discussion of the required and possible futures. If you have a few hours to read and discuss focused topics and participate in two mid-day webinars then please join is this lively learning experience focused on digital badges.
If you've never heard of a MOOC, don't worry. Massive Open Online Courses are only a year old. But Stanford, Harvard and other prestigious schools are now using them to reach millions of students worldwide. We hear about benefits — and the limits — of higher education on the Internet.
While there is a healthy amount of skepticism about the efficacy of Khan’s methods, there’s no shortage of demand for the kind of instruction he offers to students all over the world. To further meet that demand, Khan Academy has just released an app for iPhone and iPod Touch. Unlike the app released this past March for the iPad, the iPhone version does not allow interactivity. Users can view videos but cannot, as with the iPad app, download playlists, read subtitles, and log progress, making this version “more for consumption rather than full interaction.” Nevertheless, and whether critics like it or not, this represents a further step for distance learning, as education increasingly moves out of the classroom and into the handheld devices of networks of students no longer restricted by geography or physical mobility.
Digital badges are an Internet-based analogue to traditional badges. Badges have been used for many years by various organizations such as the United States Army and the Boy Scouts of America to give members a physical emblem to display the accomplishment of various achievements. Digital badges were developed to serve a similar function in an online setting.
A free, world-class education for anyone, anywhere: this is the goal of the Khan Academy, a passion project that grew from an ex-engineer and hedge funder's online tutoring sessions with his niece, who was struggling with algebra, into a worldwide phenomenon. Today millions of students, parents, and teachers use the Khan Academy's free videos and software, which have expanded to encompass nearly every conceivable subject; and Academy techniques are being employed with exciting results in a growing number of classrooms around the globe.
Like many innovators, Khan rethinks existing assumptions and imagines what education could be if freed from them. And his core idea-liberating teachers from lecturing and state-mandated calendars and opening up class time for truly human interaction-has become his life's passion. Schools seek his advice about connecting to students in a digital age, and people of all ages and backgrounds flock to the site to utilize this fresh approach to learning.
In THE ONE WORLD SCHOOLHOUSE, Khan presents his radical vision for the future of education, as well as his own remarkable story, for the first time. In these pages, you will discover, among other things:
How both students and teachers are being bound by a broken top-down model invented in Prussia two centuries ago
Why technology will make classrooms more human and teachers more important
How and why we can afford to pay educators the same as other professionals
How we can bring creativity and true human interactivity back to learning
Why we should be very optimistic about the future of learning.
Parents and politicians routinely bemoan the state of our education system. Statistics suggest we've fallen behind the rest of the world in literacy, math, and sciences. With a shrewd reading of history, Khan explains how this crisis presented itself, and why a return to "mastery learning," abandoned in the twentieth century and ingeniously revived by tools like the Khan Academy, could offer the best opportunity to level the playing field, and to give all of our children a world-class education now.
More than just a solution, THE ONE WORLD SCHOOLHOUSE serves as a call for free, universal, global education, and an explanation of how Khan's simple yet revolutionary thinking can help achieve this inspiring goal.
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Price: $26.99 US/$29.99 CAN
Physical Dimensions: 6" x 9"
"This is the year of disruption for education," says MIT computer scientist Anant Agarwal, the president of edX. "The time is right because the Internet is available in large parts of the world. Computers and tablets have become relatively low cost. Things are moving extremely, extremely fast."
Online learning is one of the fastest-growing segments of the education system. One of the recent innovations is the massive open online course (MOOC). Since 2008, numerous MOOCs have been run by public and elite universities. Most recently, Stanford, MIT, Harvard, and other universities have embraced the MOOC format through significant resource allocation. MOOCs are not solely confined to elite US universities, as the format is now offered by institutions and education systems around the world.
While MOOCs are beginning to burgeon in the higher education space, research in the area is still very limited. For educators, learning designers, and university administrators, making decisions around MOOC design and deployment can be difficult given the lack of published research.
A special issue of the MERLOT Journal of Online Learning and Teaching (JOLT) is planned for Summer 2013 that will address the weak MOOC research base. Both papers reporting on empirical studies/evaluations (research papers, case studies) as well as conceptual and position papers will be considered for publication in the special issue ...
Topics of interest include but are not limited to the following:
Experiences of learners in MOOCs
What MOOC models can teach us about face-to-face or hybrid courses (MOOC-ification)
21st-Century skills/literacies needed in MOOCs
Planning, designing, and running a MOOC
Business models for MOOCs
MOOCs across subject areas and disciplines
MOOCs across education stages and sectors
MOOCs in different parts of the world
Case-study comparison of different MOOCs
Learning (Instructional) Design/Pedagogy of MOOCs
Learning design methodology and practices with MOOCs
MOOCs as flexible platforms for critical pedagogical discourse
MOOCs as process, MOOCs as content – pedagogical implications
Social and cultural issues for interactions among global MOOC students MOOCs and formative assessment
MOOCs and educational data mining/learning analytics
Metrics of success and failure in MOOCs
Summative assessment and accreditation of the MOOC (badge theories, certifications,
Value of MOOCs for faculty, research and interdisciplinary/team-teaching models
Critiques of the MOOC format
Learning theory and MOOCs
Learning sciences and MOOCs
MOOCs from senior administration and leadership perspectives
Sustainability of MOOCs
Security and privacy in MOOCs
Physical meetups in MOOCs
MOOCs in a realigning higher education space (e.g., role/place in formal and non-formal
education, implications for for-profit online education providers)
MOOCs and mobile environments
MOOCs and virtual worlds/MMORPGs
MOOCs and augmented/mixed reality
MOOCs and data collection and analytics
Accepted papers will be published in the Summer 2013 issue of JOLT (scheduled for release in June 2013).
The Gates Foundation has made a number of strategic investments in a range of postsecondary areas, and these investments complement several existing work streams. Though Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have much to prove, the foundation is interested in their potential to make content and learning more accessible and affordable at web scale—at least for some students and some types of content.
On November 13th 2012, the foundation awarded 12 grants, totaling more than $3 million, in new investments in MOOCs. These grants include:
$895,484 to the American Council on Education to test the viability of MOOCs for college transfer credit and to establish a Presidents Innovation Lab to explore new business models in higher education
$268,920 to the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities to explore the viability of a consortium of two- and four-year colleges to collaborate on digital courseware development and usage, including MOOCs
$1,440,900 to Ithaka S+R to monitor, assess, and document lessons learned from the implementations of a range of MOOCs and MOOC platforms in partnership with the University of Maryland System
$550,000 in total to the following institutions ($50,000 per MOOC) to develop introductory and remedial level MOOCs. These institutions are winners selected from a Request for Proposals released in September (technology platform partner noted in parentheses):
Cuyahoga Community College to develop a Developmental Math MOOC (Blackboard)
Duke University to develop an English Composition I MOOC (Coursera)
Georgia Institute of Technology to develop three MOOCs: Psychology, English Composition I, and Physics (Coursera)
Michigan State University to develop a Foundations of Science MOOC (Desire2Learn)
Mt. San Jacinto College to develop a Developmental Writing MOOC (Coursera)
The Ohio State University to develop an English Composition II MOOC (Coursera)
University of Washington to develop a Political Science MOOC (Coursera)
University of Wisconsin – La Crosse [www.uwlax.edu] to develop an Algebra MOOC (Desire2Learn)
Wake Technical Community College to develop a Developmental Math MOOC (Udacity)
The foundation also announced a pool of approximately $250,000 in research funds on November 12th that will be allocated in the coming months. Among the questions that will be addressed are:
For which students, disciplines, types of knowledge, and contexts are MOOCs more/less effective?
Which components drive impact for non-self-directed learners and what additional supports need to be added online or face-to-face?
What data captured from MOOCs is most informative and how might such data be best used for the advancement of learning?
Semester Online is the first-of-its-kind program to offer rigorous, online, for-credit undergraduate courses through a consortium of top-tier colleges and universities. The program will be delivered through a virtual classroom environment and interactive platform developed by 2U, formerly known as 2tor.
Semester Online courses will feature primarily the same faculty and curricula as their brick-and-mortar counterparts. Students will experience a state-of-the-art virtual classroom, including live class sessions that connect students and renowned professors; compelling, richly produced, self-paced course materials; and a strong social network that allows students to collaborate and build relationships online.
Students will have the chance to take advantage of unique course offerings from some of the most prestigious institutions in the country, courses they would not otherwise have access to. They will be able to work, travel, participate in off-campus research programs or manage personal commitments that in the past would have meant putting their studies on hold.
Beginning in the fall of 2013, Semester Online will be available to academically qualified students attending consortium schools as well as other top schools across the country.
WASHINGTON, DC (November 13, 2012) – The Association of Public and Land-grant Universities today announced a plan to build momentum among public universities and community colleges toward collaborating and advancing a new generation of college course wares intended to personalize students’ learning experiences and improve success rates. This works is being funded with a planning grant of $269,000 from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
The Gates Foundation grant will enable APLU to gauge the feasibility of bringing together public institutions, both universities and community colleges, in a cooperative venture promoting the acquisition or creation and adoption of course wares. The focus is “interactive learning online” systems, as they are sometimes called, which include those that gain a sense of a student’s state of knowledge and personalize the learning experience accordingly.
“MOOCs are an exciting innovation. They hold great promise, but are not without challenges– and we are still discovering their full potential,” said Dan Greenstein, Director, Postsecondary Success, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. “We believe having diverse options for faculty and students that meet a wide array of learning needs and styles can enhance student engagement, improve educational outcomes, and increase college completion rates. We are eager to learn from and share the data that will be generated from these investments in MOOCs.”
This grant proposal has two strands to test comparatively rapidly whether such a concept is workable and likely to flourish: an administrative strand and a faculty strand. In the administrative strand, APLU will reach out initially to APLU universities and community colleges to explore the readiness of institutions to join a stand-alone membership consortium focused on these issues and test notions of its essential functions.
Through a faculty strand, APLU hopes to demonstrate that grass-roots cooperation and pre-disposition toward adoption of course wares can be stimulated within the framework of a collaborative consortium, especially through facilitation of faculty discussions leading meaningful descriptions of what their students most need.
This project builds on previous APLU efforts, notably the Cognitive Course Wares Initiative, to reach across institutional boundaries and foster mutually beneficial collaborations.
The American Council on Education has agreed to review a handful of free online courses offered by elite universities and may recommend that other colleges grant credit for them.
The move could lead to a world in which many students graduate from traditional colleges faster by taking self-guided courses on the side, taught free by professors from Stanford University, the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, and other well-known colleges.
In what leaders describe as a pilot project, the group will consider five to 10 massive open online courses, or MOOC's, offered through Coursera for possible inclusion in the council's College Credit Recommendation Service. That service has been around since the 1970s and focuses on certifying training courses, offered outside of traditional colleges, for which students might want college credit. [snip]
Last year, a provider of low-cost online courses called StraighterLine became one of the first online institutions to win inclusion in the recommendation service.
ACE also announced on Tuesday that it will set up a Presidential Innovation Lab that will bring together college leaders to discuss the potential of MOOC's and new business models for higher education. The lab is supported by an $895,453 grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, as part of about $3-million in new MOOC-related grants announced Tuesday.
'Next Generation of AP Courses'
Ms. Koller stressed that the new arrangement is merely a pilot project, and that the courses have to pass muster before they win admission to ACE Credit.
Even if ACE recommends the courses, it is up to individual colleges to decide whether to grant transfer credit for them. So the next question becomes, Will colleges welcome such transfers?
Tristan Denley, provost at Austin Peay State University, outside of Nashville, said that if MOOC's proved an equivalent replacement for traditional courses, he would expect his institution to embrace them.
Josh Jarrett, deputy director for postsecondary success at the Gates foundation, said that "MOOC's may be the next generation of AP courses." [snip]
For instance, another Gates-foundation grant announced Tuesday, for $1,440,900, will support researchers from Ithaka S+R, a group that speeds development of information technologies for higher education, to study the effectiveness of MOOC's used in a "flipped classroom" model. In that model, students at traditional campuses watch lecture videos for homework and use class time for discussion rather than lecture.
In that way, Mr. Jarrett said, MOOC's may turn out to be a high-tech replacement for a textbook.
The Gates foundation also announced Tuesday the names of nine institutions that will receive grants to develop remedial and introductory classes. Those institutions include Cuyahoga Community College Foundation, Wake Technical Community College, and Ohio State University.
Moderator: Diana Oblinger, President and CEO, EDUCAUSE
Speakers: Malcolm Brown, Director, EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative
Andy Calkins, Deputy Director, Next Generation Learning Challenges
George Siemens, Associate Director, Technology Enhanced Knowledge Research Institute, Athabasca University
Although there may be disagreement about where higher education is headed, few will disagree that we are in a time of change, a time in which a unique set of challenges have emerged. How should we respond to the impact of open educational resources, to the opportunities of big data and analytics, to the large amounts of venture capital and foundation funding being invested in postsecondary education? What new organizational and leadership models are called for? An open online course, Current/Future State of Higher Education, conducted in fall 2012, evaluated the change pressures that face universities and the opportunities that can help universities prepare for the future state of higher education. In this webinar, the presenters will harvest the key ideas, insights, and discussion points that came to light in the course of the online course, inviting further discussion with the webinar attendees.
The rapid rise of MOOCs has rejuvenated conversations about copyright and the development of distance education programs. Copyright long has been a challenge for distance learning, and the vast scale of MOOCs escalates the importance of addressing the law in a most thoughtful and creative manner. Hundreds of thousands of students are now enrolling in courses with prominent professors from leading universities, delivered through organizations such as Coursera, edX, Udacity, and others. All of these players have copyright questions, yet too often they ask the wrong questions. Starting the conversation with the right question can determine whether we reach productive and useful outcomes, or become mired in limited and contentious options. This is a good time to push aside wrong questions and get a fresh start on the important copyright issues.
Wrong Question #1: “Who owns the copyright in my online course?”
The Better Question #1: “How can we best allocate and manage rights in our online course?”
Wrong Question #2: “Does fair use allow me to cut and paste and include a variety of materials into my online course?”
[snip] The Better Question #2: “What are the options for including copyrighted works in an online course?”
Michael Saylor, chief executive of MicroStrategy, whose online education company seeks to offer no-cost courses to the world: Traditional teaching is like "giving people thousands of rubber mallets and asking them to drill a hole through a mountain. We need nitroglycerine."
His "nitroglycerine" is Saylor.org, a nonprofit online university he backs as sole trustee of the Saylor Foundation. Saylor's model is to offer students a free, one-stop shop for self-paced college courses. Saylor.org aggregates free content offered by open-source providers like MIT OpenCourseWare and Open Yale Courses, and groups it so that students can pursue a continuous sequence of courses in a major.
The model takes a different approach than that of high-profile providers of massive open online courses, or MOOC's, mainly in its role as an aggregator of online content into comprehensive courses. Instead of following a professor through a series of video lectures and peer-graded exercises on Coursera, for example, students in Saylor courses read, listen to, and watch material from different sources and grade themselves using answer keys.
Co-sponsored by GreaterThanGames and the PhD Lab in Digital Knowledge
Please join us for an event on MOOCs (Massively Open Online Courses) and play in education with Pete Rorabaugh (English, Georgia State University; @allistelling) and Jesse Stommel (English & Digital Humanities, Marylhurst University; @jessifer), editors of the journal Hybrid Pedagogy. Adeline Koh (Literature, Richard Stockton College & 2012-13 Humanities Writ Large Visiting Faculty Fellow) will moderate. We’ll be livestreaming the event on the FHI Youtube channel, and everyone is encouraged to watch and take part via the Twitterstream: hashtag #dukehp.
More about the event: This summer Hybrid Pedagogy ran the experimental course, MOOC MOOC, a mini-MOOC, a meta-MOOC, a MOOC about MOOCs. The course was announced in the Hybrid Pedagogy article, “The March of the MOOCs: Monstrous Open Online Courses,” in which Jesse argues,
“Content and learning are two separate things, often at odds… Most content is finite and contained; whereas, learning is chaotic and indeterminate. It’s relatively easy to create technological infrastructures to deliver content, harder to build relationships and learning communities to help mediate, inflect, and disrupt that content.”While institutions ponder how to make excursions into new media more efficient and profitable, the pedagogues at the digital table must push the other side of the envelope. We should be creating critical and reflective sandboxes that invite learners to set their own goals, make mistakes, collaborate, and improvise.
We are again talking about innovation in higher education and it is a refreshing change. The most conspicuous, challenging and controversial subject of these discussions is “MOOCs” – massive open online courses. MOOCs such as Coursera, Udacity and edX, all launched in early 2012, have received extensive media coverage accompanied by a lot of commentary. What type of education is offered here? Will it last? How do we judge its quality? Is there a role for accreditation?
'... [A] list of free online courses offered by leading universities. Most of these free courses offer “certificates” or “statements of completion.” (See the key below to understand the credentials offered by each course.) Courses are arranged by start date, ... .
This site helps you navigate in e-Learning sources. We try to systematize information about online education. You can use this service to find online courses, share comments and reviews. Our mission is to help people to build a personal education path using free or cheap online courses as alternative to traditional higher education. We help to find free alternatives to expensive college/university courses. Khan Academy courses added (11-16-12)
AT the end of “Fundamentals of Atomic Force Microscopy,” a short online course offered by Purdue University, students who score at least 60 percent on the final exam will receive an e-mail with a file attached. It will contain a picture of a blue-and-white circle, roughly one inch in diameter, embossed with the stylized image of an atomic force microscope bouncing a laser beam off a cantilever into a photodiode, which is how scientists take photographs and measure the size of very small (nanoscale) things.
The picture is a digital badge, a new type of credential being developed by some of the most prominent businesses and learning organizations in the world, including Purdue, Carnegie Mellon, the University of California, the Smithsonian, Intel and Disney-Pixar. The badge movement is being spearheaded by the Mozilla Foundation, best known for inventing the free Firefox Web browser, the choice of nearly one-quarter of all Internet users worldwide.
Badges are gaining currency at the same time that a growing number of elite universities have begun offering free or low-cost, noncredit courses to anyone with access to the Internet and a desire to learn. Millions of students have already signed up for massive open online courses, or MOOCs. By developing information-age credentials backed by a wide array of organizations outside the education system, creators of badge programs may be mounting the first serious competition to traditional degrees since college-going became the norm.
Organized By: Una Daly, Director of Community College Outreach
Please join the Community College Consortium at Open Courseware on Tuesday, November 13, 1:00 pm Eastern for a webinar on Massively Online Open Courses (MOOCs).
MOOCs have been a hot topic in the higher education blogosphere for the last year but how do you separate the fact from the fiction and should your college be participating in the latest trend for online content delivery and credentialing of student learning. You will hear from both a professor who is currently teaching a MOOC at University of Central Florida to one who analyzes emerging business models at British Columbia Institute of Technology. In addition, we will have the president of Open Study, an educational technology start-up, who will share how their peer mentoring model can support the students who enroll in MOOCs.
Carol Edwards, Business Professor at British Columbia Institute of Technology and Business Analyst. Carol investigated MOOCs for her institution looking at it from a student centric and organizational business model viewpoint and will share with you what she found.
Dr. Preetha Ram, Co-founder of OpenStudy and Dean at Emory College. Preetha’s company OpenStudy promotes online peer mentoring for enhanced student learning. She will share their research findings on how peer mentoring can enhance students learning with MIT Open Courseware and MOOCs.
Dr. Kelvin Thompson, Blended Learning MOOC Instructor, Professor at University of Central Florida. Kelvin will share his findings from teaching a Blended Learning Faculty Development course as a MOOC both in summer and fall of 2012 with Dr. Linda Futch at University of Central Florida. He will share lessons learned and what it takes to make a MOOC an effective learning experience.
No pre-registration necessary. On the day of the webinar, ... click on the webinar page (see below) to login and then press the Connect button. Source and Links Available At
Two software companies that sell course-management systems, Blackboard and Instructure, have entered the race to provide free online courses for the masses.
On Thursday both companies plan to announce partnerships with universities that will use their software to teach massive open online courses, or MOOC’s. The companies hope to pull in their own college clients to compete with online-education players like Udacity and Coursera.
Instructure has released a new platform called Canvas Network, which allows colleges and universities that already use the company’s learning-management system to offer free courses. A dozen institutions have already agreed to deliver courses on the platform, including Brown University and the University of Washington.
The courses, which will begin in January, are a “response to the MOOC phenomenon that’s been going on,” said Josh Coates, chief executive of Instructure. The courses—20 of them, for starters—will cover a wide range of topics, including one on college algebra and another on gender in comic books that will be co-taught by Stan Lee, who helped create Spider-Man and other characters.
Some universities using Canvas have expressed interest in charging tuition for the online courses in the future or offering course credit for them, Mr. Coates said. The company may also expand the new Canvas Network into secondary education.
Unlike Instructure, Blackboard allows any university to offer MOOC’s on its platform, even if the institutions are not Blackboard clients. Arizona State University, the State University of New York’s Buffalo State College, and the University of Illinois at Springfield chose Blackboard after considering other MOOC providers.
Instructors may be drawn toward teaching MOOC’s on those platforms rather than Udacity or Coursera because they are already familiar with the companies’ course-management software.