Mooc

Sometimes it helps to look backwards and figure out where you’ve been to get a clearer picture of where you’re going. As today is the first official day of my Shuttleworth Fellowship, I’ve been taking the opportunity to reflect on where I’ve come from and where I’m going. Upon reflection, it feels like I have some really strong momentum behind my work in open education. But where is that momentum carrying me? How can I leverage it thoughtfully to be more useful? (This thinking fortuitously coincides with a recent article titled Why Open Educational Resources Have Not Noticeably Affected Higher Education to which I have included a paragraph response to below. Spolier alert: we see the world very differently.) ...

When David Noble first published his groundbreaking critique of online education in 1998, Digital Diploma Mills: The Automation of Higher Education, I thought to myself “he couldn’t be more wrong.” As it turns out he might not have been wrong - maybe Noble was simply so miraculously prescient that I couldn’t see what he saw. Fifteen - count them, fifteen - years later, Digital Diploma Mills reads as if it were researched and written about the current phenomenon called “MOOCs.” Entire paragraphs from the essay can be read unaltered and applied precisely to the state of things today: ...

Cable Green sent a frustrated email today to the Educause Openness Constituent Group. Here’s the key point: The Babson Survey Research Group has released a new report: Growing the Curriculum: Open Education Resources in U.S. Higher Education. This sentence is of particular concern to me: “One concept very important to many in the OER field was rarely mentioned at all – licensing terms such as creative commons that permit free use or re-purposing by others.” ...

For several months now I’ve been working with a great group of people on Degreed. Today we launched the public beta at the HASTAC/MacArthur grantees meeting (the Mozilla open badges functionality in Degreed is supported by a DML grant). So what does it do? Degreed eliminates the distinction between formal and informal learning by jailbreaking your college transcript and interweaving Mozilla open badges and other informal credentials together with your college courses. We help you categorize these formal and informal credentials in order to create a credential remix that allows you to showcase everything you know - not just what you learned in school. Unlike your college transcript, your Degreed profile continues to grow as you continue to learn throughout life. ...

I’ve been thinking about what’s next for OER… With the current set of MOOCs - which aren’t even open - grabbing attention away from the real movement, we need an exciting idea to get behind. Something that can inspire another decade of work across the nation and around the world. (When was the last time you heard about a new OpenCourseWare initiative launching in the US? When was the last time you personally thought of OCW as being really innovative?) We need something that can capture the imagination, something that can inspire both faculty and institutional leaders, something that will bring another 100 US post-secondary schools into the open education movement. Most of all, we need something that will significantly bless the lives of millions of students, providing them access to educational opportunities that can radically transform their lives for good. ...

MOOC = Massive Open Online Course There are a number of reasons why the term MOOC is a misnomer. - Many MOOCs are massive but not open (e.g., http://www.udacity.com/legal/) - Many MOOCs are open but not massive (e.g., http://learninganalytics.net/syllabus.html) - Many MOOCs try very hard not to be courses (e.g., http://cck11.mooc.ca/how.htm) Well, at least all MOOCs offered to date have been online - so at least there’s one thing we can agree on. ...

Audrey has a nice piece today on problems with the term MOOC. I’ve always passionately hated the MOOC acronym, mostly because of one of the words behind it. There was never anything massive about what we were doing until the Stanford AI class came along. Nothing that has come out of the original group (Wiley, Couros, Downes, Siemens, Cormier, et al.) has approached anything justifying the term “massive.” And given the size of the MMPORGs like World of Warcraft the term was borrowed from, the Stanford AI course may not even qualify. The M in MOOC has never been justified, and the whole term is aspirational in a way that only highlights the lack of broad impact our work is actually having. ...

One of the philosophical underpinnings of MOOCs as practiced by Siemens, Downes, et al. has been the rejection of the idea of pre-defined learning outcomes. For example, the LAK12 syllabus reads in part: “You are NOT expected to read and watch everything. Even we, the facilitators, cannot do that. Instead, what you should do is PICK AND CHOOSE content that looks interesting to you and is appropriate for you. If it looks too complicated, don’t read it. If it looks boring, move on to the next item.” The learning outcomes will, consequently, “be different for each person.” ...

A brief history of the impending transformation of post-secondary education, just to clarify where we are, followed by some commentary. Dates are approximate as I’m working from memory on an airplane. Perhaps later I’ll turn this into a proper piece of writing with supporting links, etc., if folks find it interesting. 7x - The internet. Data can be routed from computer to computer. The cost of copying and distributing content begins its drop toward zero. ...

One of the mainstays of my approach to open teaching is the “public performance” of student work. Since 2004 I’ve been encouraging the learners I work with to post their writing and other artifacts to publicly readable blogs. I have seen, time and again, that a different quality of work is done when people are making a permanent contribution to the “great conversation” compared to the work people do when they think that only the TA grading papers will see it. ...