Online Learning Update

BY PHILIP MAUGHAN, New Statesman

A new report from the IPPR entitled “An avalanche is coming: Higher education and the revolution ahead” warns that British universities are at risk if they fail to respond to competition from abroad. “Why would you go to the quite ordinary lecture by a quite ordinary lecturer when you can get Niall Ferguson online?” Sir Michael Barber, “deliverology” expert and Chief Education Advisor at Pearson, asked John Humphrys on Monday’s Today programme. Barber claims that “the Ronaldo effect” will mean the best lecturers – of course, crowd-pleasing lecturers and first class educators are not one and the same – can “command the circumstances they want and move from one university to another”. He praises the Employability Centre at Exeter University, and UCL’s plans for a “university quarter” in Stratford, aimed at cashing in on the booming local economy. In every case, two assumptions are made: the first is that help finding a job is the only reason university is worth attending. The second is that higher education should bolster a thriving economy, rather than the other way around.

http://www.newstatesman.com/education/2013/03/celebrity-professors-online-lectures-and-employability-classes

By Rachel Taylor, Univ of Delaware Review

At a hearing Monday, Faculty senators debated reforming the university’s online education policy to reflect current standards of teaching. Senators discussed freshmen access to online classes and updates to make policy technologically current. Deni Galileo, biology professor and the president-elect of Faculty Senate, said the hearing intended to address the online education guidelines, which have not been revised for 20 years. “It’s very archaic,” Galileo said. “It talks about videotaping lectures and this is from the era when they would video tape the professors’ lectures, put them in a box and ship them to a secondary site.” Galileo said he hopes the revisions will last for at least a decade before needing updates. He edited policies and put them up for discussion among attending faculty.

http://www.udreview.com/faculty-debate-reforming-online-education-policy-1.3008202#.UT-BpByG32s

by the Daily Pilot

From the Los Angeles Times

Chemistry students across the nation and the world will have free and open access to videotaped, online classes from UC Irvine under an unusual initiative starting Monday. UC Irvine’s “OpenChem” program will allow curious visitors and serious science scholars to watch 15 quarter–length undergraduate chemistry courses and some graduate-level lectures, according to a campus announcement. It is not for degree credit but is expected to help students and the public prepare for examinations, review material before taking credit courses or just explore things for knowledge’s sake. It is a collaboration between UC Irvine’s School of Physical Sciences and the university’s OpenCourseWare program, which has been putting many classes and lectures online in various disciplines. OpenChem will allow students “to follow a coherent and integrated pathway toward full mastery of undergraduate chemistry,” said Gary W. Matkin, UC Irvine’s dean of Continuing Education, Distance Learning and Summer Session, in a statement.

http://www.dailypilot.com/ocnow/tn-dpt-uc-irvine-offers-free-online-chemistry-classes-but-not-for-credit-20130311,0,5961195.story

by Ron Mahieu, et. al.; EURODL

Due to societal changes there is a growing need for distant and adult learning. The reason to participate in education and the choices that students make may differ. In this study the factors age, gender, rate of studies and parenthood have been analysed in order to see how these relate to different motivational factors for choosing a web-based course. The data has been based on a questionnaire, covering 1270 beginner students in the spring semester of 2011 and contains their background characteristics and items focusing on their motives. These could be categorized into four different motives: (1) Format, (2) Content, (3) Economic, and (4) Curiosity. The results showed that Format was regarded as the most important factor for choosing an Internet-based course, followed by Content, Curiosity and the Economic factor. Furthermore, group differences were investigated with respect to age, gender, parenthood and rate of study. The findings show that distant education fulfils an important function for mature students, women and students with children. These groups presumably consider the flexibility that web-based courses provide advantageous. Family situations or working-life obligations may contribute to this. Changes in people’s working lives are likely to continue, which presumably increases the demand for flexible learning situations.

http://www.eurodl.org/?article=547

By Crystal Chilcott, The Scribe UCCS (U Colorado Colorado Springs)

Attend class from home without losing the classroom experience, take one class from several professors across thecountry and access diverse perspectives from one location. UCCS is using the Internet to provide more than what is offered in the average college class. Abby Ferber, a women’s and ethnic studiesprofessor, teaches Perspectives on Race and Ethnic Relations as a hybrid online and on-campus course. Her class alternates between meeting online and oncampus. During the on-campus meetings, studentscommunicate with students from the University of Rhode Island and Spelman College. The latter, based in Atlanta, is the one of the oldest African-American women’s collegesin the nation. “The interaction with Spelman College is the neatest part of the course. As a black women’s college in the South, it has a totally different environment, which is great for our students who maybe haven’t been exposed to that,” Ferber said. The distance course allows the professors to team-teach. Both professors at the other schools are African-American, and the Rhode Island professor is male.

http://www.uccsscribe.com/culture/hybrid-courses-add-depth-to-education-with-technology-1.2816467#.UT4nRhyG32s

by Jessica Shepherd, the Guardian

Traditional, middle-ranking universities face extinction within the next decade, a leading education expert has said. Sir Michael Barber, chief education adviser of the world’s biggest education firm, Pearson, said even elite universities could struggle to survive in the face of competition from online courses and giant for-profit colleges. In a report for the Institute for Public Policy Research, a centre-left thinktank, Barber urges British universities to “mark themselves out of the crowd” to stop an “avalanche of change” sweeping them away. “The traditional multipurpose university with a combination of a range of degrees and a modestly effective research programme has had its day,” he writes in his report, An Avalanche Is Coming.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2013/mar/11/uk-universities-threat-online-courses

by Yu-Chun Kuo, Andrew E Walker, Brian R Belland, Kerstin E E Schroder; IRRODL

This paper is intended to investigate the degree to which interaction and other predictors contribute to student satisfaction in online learning settings. This was a preliminary study towards a dissertation work which involved the establishment of interaction and satisfaction scales through a content validity survey. Regression analysis was performed to determine the contribution of predictor variables to student satisfaction. The effects of student background variables on predictors were explored. The results showed that learner-instructor interaction, learner-content interaction, and Internet self-efficacy were good predictors of student satisfaction while interactions among students and self-regulated learning did not contribute to student satisfaction. Learner-content interaction explained the largest unique variance in student satisfaction. Additionally, gender, class level, and time spent online per week seemed to have influence on learner-learner interaction, Internet self-efficacy, and self-regulation.

http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/article/view/1338

by Jeff Dunn, Edudemic

I’m a big TED talks fan. I like to stay abreast of some of the lesser-known names and discussions happening that don’t make it into my regular social media and news feeds. I love to see what the brilliant minds down the street from me (at MIT and Harvard) are working on. TED talks provide a fascinating opportunity to learn from the best.

Key Takeaways

• The 5 most popular themes of TED talks are happiness, knowledge, ethics, food, and psychology
• The 5 least popular themes of TED talks are architecture, weather, media, war, and time.
• Sir Ken Robinson’s “Do Schools Kill Creativity?” is the most viewed TED talk ever with just under 15 million views.
• Longer is better. The most successful videos are at least 18 minutes long. Less popular videos are about 12 minutes long.
• More than 140 different TED talks have each seen 1 million views.

http://edudemic.com/2013/03/why-ted-talks-have-become-so-popular/

by Andy Tattersall, ScHARR Library

The course had over 41,000 students enroll, although evidence seemed to show that about 20% were active participants; ‘active’ meaning that they had communicated using one of the various social platforms associated with the course. The majority had some form of higher education background and were based in the U.S or Western Europe. Communication by the course hosts and students was predominantly via Social Media, in particular Twitter, Google+ and Facebook. More formal communication by course leaders and students occurred within the Coursera discussion forums for the EDC MOOC. After five weeks, students were expected to submit a digital artefact that captured an idea or concept from the course materials. The artefact could be anything from text to video, from images to audio, including tools such as YouTube and Prezi as dominant mediums of delivery. Each submission was peer-reviewed by three students, although each student had the option to review more than three artefacts.

http://scharrlibrary.blogspot.com/2013/03/whats-it-like-to-be-mooc-student.html

by Debbie Morrison, Online Learning Insights

Is peer grading an effective assessment method for open and online learning? What about in MOOCs where student feedback may be the only means of determining a pass or fail in a course? This posts examine peer grading and suggests what conditions must be present in order for peer grading to be effective.

http://onlinelearninginsights.wordpress.com/2013/03/09/why-and-when-peer-grading-is-effective-for-open-and-online-learning/

by Amy Scott, Marketplace

Budget cuts have taken such a big bite out of California’s community colleges and universities that thousands of students are turned away from required classes. “No college student should be denied the right to complete their education because they could not get a seat [in] the course that they needed in order to graduate,” said Darrell Steinberg, president pro tem of the California senate. If it passes, the bill could be good news for companies like StraighterLine, based in Baltimore, Md. The company sells low-cost intro courses like the ones students are having trouble getting into. “What it also does is open a much larger marketplace,” says Burck Smith, StraighterLine’s CEO.“A larger marketplace will ultimately drive prices down, will raise quality up, and that’s a good thing.” Others looking for a bigger slice of that market are providers of those massive open courses — companies like Udacity and Coursera. Classes on artificial intelligence and gamification have been wildly popular, but few colleges accept them for actual credit.

http://www.marketplace.org/topics/economy/education/how-online-credits-could-change-higher-eds-business-model

by Lee Gardner and Jeffrey R. Young, Chronicle of Higher Ed

Supporters of newly proposed legislation in California hope to reduce the number of students shut out of key courses by forging an unprecedented partnership between traditional public colleges and online-education upstarts. But on Wednesday specific details of how the deal would work were hard to pin down. Senate Bill 520, sponsored by State Sen. Darrell Steinberg, a Democrat who is president pro tem of the Senate, calls for establishing a statewide platform through which students who have trouble getting into certain low-level, high-demand classes could take approved online courses offered by providers outside the state’s higher-education system. If the bill is passed by the Legislature and signed into law by Gov. Jerry Brown, a Democrat, state colleges and universities could be compelled to accept credits earned in massive open online courses, or MOOCs, bringing the controversial courses into the mainstream faster than even their proponents had predicted.

http://chronicle.com/article/A-Bold-Move-Toward-MOOCs-Sends/137903/

 by  Cable Green, Creative Commons

California (CA) Senate President pro Tem Darrell Steinberg (author of the CA open textbook legislation) announced that SB 520 will be amended to provide open, online college courses for credit. In short, the bill will allow CA students, enrolled in CA public colleges and universities, to take online courses from a pool of 50 high enrollment, introductory courses, offered by 3rd parties, in which CA students cannot currently gain access from their public CA university or community college. Students must already be enrolled in the CA college or university in which they want to receive credit. The 50 courses and plans for their assessment will be reviewed and approved (or not) by a faculty committee prior to being admitted into this new online course marketplace.

http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/37278

Dave Cieslewicz, the Isthmus

The University of Wisconsin-Madison has taken the plunge into the brave new world of massively available, free online course offerings. The largest provider of open online college courses had been courting the university to join its network of free content providers since at least last summer.According to Jeff Russell, vice provost for Life Long Learning and dean of the Division of Continuing Studies, the UW administration resisted those overtures until last month. That’s when interim chancellor David Ward announced that the university would join Coursera, which will now provide hundreds of free online courses from dozens of institutions of higher learning.Coursera is currently offering 325 courses from 62 universities around the world, including such prestigious names as Brown, Princeton, Johns Hopkins and Cal Tech. The UW now joins other Big Ten schools, including Michigan, Ohio State, Penn State, Illinois, Minnesota and Northwestern. Big Ten schools-in-waiting, Rutgers and Maryland, are also members of the Coursera family.

http://www.isthmus.com/isthmus/article.php?article=39316

By Molly Schulson, Brown University Daily Herald

The Office of Continuing Education will offer its first free pre-college online course, an introductory course entitled “Exploring Engineering,” starting next month through Canvas Network. The course will be offered through Canvas instead of Coursera, the online course platform that will host three Brown massive open online courses this summer, to allow the University to try out another method of virtual instruction, said Harriette Hemmasi, University librarian and chair of the strategic planning Committee on Online Teaching and Learning. The Coursera massive open online courses, also known as MOOCs, will be free, not for credit and open to anyone. “The more opportunities that we take advantage of and the more experimentation, the better,” Hemmasi said.

http://www.browndailyherald.com/2013/03/08/online-engineering-course-emphasizes-interactive-learning/

by Harini Jaganathan, Chicago Marroon

In light of the growing popularity of third-party online class platforms such as Coursera and edX that post lectures by faculty from elite institutions, the University of Chicago has begun to discuss the possibility of offering massive open online courses (MOOCs). In September, Provost Thomas Rosenbaum appointed two faculty committees to look into the issues associated with offering online classes. One committee is looking into courses for credit and the second is looking into courses not for credit. Committee findings are expected to be released in April, according to Deputy Provost for Research Roy Weiss, who serves on both committees and is chair of the latter.Coursera and edX host online classes on a wide range of subjects and are available for free. There are currently 62 universities partnered with Coursera, including Stanford, Caltech, and, as of this month, Northwestern. EdX, which was started by Harvard and MIT, has 12 partners in total.

http://chicagomaroon.com/2013/03/08/uchicago-considers-offering-open-online-courses/

by Paul Fain and Ry Rivard, Inside Higher Ed

A powerful California lawmaker wants public college students who are shut out of popular courses to attend low-cost online alternatives – including those offered by for-profit companies – and he plans to encourage the state’s public institutions to grant credit for those classes. The proposal expected today from Darrell Steinberg, a Democrat and president pro tem of the state Senate, aims to create a “statewide system of faculty-approved, online college courses,” according to a written statement from Steinberg’s office. (A spokesman for Steinberg declined to discuss the bill.) Faculty would decide which courses should make the cut for a pool of online offerings. Likely participants include Udacity and Coursera, two major massive open online course providers, sources said. Another option might be StraighterLine, a low-cost, self-paced online course company.

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/03/13/california-bill-encourage-mooc-credit-public-colleges

by Larry Hardesty, MIT News

Educators are only beginning to scratch the surface of the possibilities presented by online-learning technologies. As Philipp Schmidt, director of Peer 2 Peer University and a fellow at the Media Lab, put it during the first panel, the field is now at the stage where film was when the first movie cameras became available and people immediately mounted them at the backs of theaters to record stage plays. But the mere fact that the rapid proliferation of online-learning tools has forced universities to reexamine their pedagogical assumptions may be a step forward in itself. As MIT President L. Rafael Reif said after the conference, “I couldn’t have imagined circumstances in which you could get all these communities together to discuss education.”

http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2013/edx-summit-0306.html

BY MICHAEL HORN AND CLAYTON CHRISTENSEN, Wired

MOOCs can be much more than marketing and edutainment. We believe they are likely to evolve into a “scale business”: one that relies on the technology and data backbone of the medium to optimize and individualize learning opportunities for millions of students. This is very different than simply putting a video of a professor lecturing online. The initial MOOCs came from a “process business model” where companies bring inputs together at one end and transform them into a higher-value output for customers at the other end — as with the retail and manufacturing industries. But over time, an approach where users exchange information from each other similar to Facebook or telecommunications (a “facilitated network model”) will come to dominate online learning. This evolution is especially likely to happen if the traditional degree becomes irrelevant and, as many predict, learning becomes a continuous, on-the-job learning process. Then the need for customization will drive us toward just-in-time mini-courses.

http://www.wired.com/opinion/2013/02/beyond-the-mooc-buzz-where-are-they-going-really/

by David F. Carr, Information Week

Massive open online courses (MOOCs) will not replace universities but will force them to rethink how they educate their students, leaders of two of the leading MOOCs predicted at this week’s SXSWedu conference. Coursera co-founder Andrew Ng appeared with edX President Anant Agarwal on a keynote panel moderated by Laura Pappano, The New York Times reporter who declared The Year of the MOOC in a November article. It was one of the best attended events of the conference on educational technology and innovation, a spin off of the South by Southwest conference. MOOCs have attracted attention for making courses taught by professors from top universities available online, for free, in a format that allows enrollments sometimes topping 100,000 students per course.

http://www.informationweek.com/education/online-learning/sxswedu-a-mooc-love-fest/240150227

by Ki Mae Heussner, GigaOM

Even if providers of massive open online courses don’t intend to provide degrees or degree equivalents, that doesn’t mean degrees fully powered by informal sources aren’t on the horizon. Barely a year into their existence, massive open online course (MOOC) providers, like Coursera EdX and Udacity, are starting to offer certificates that can be put toward university credit. But are full MOOC degrees on the horizon?  When asked that question by New York Times education reporter Laura Pappano on stage at the SXSWedu education technology conference in Austin Wednesday, Coursera co-founder Andrew Ng gave the diplomatic reply: “Coursera isn’t a university. We don’t offer degrees of academic credit. We’re a humble hosting platform.” To which Anant Agarwal, president of the nonprofit EdX, quipped: “a very politically correct answer” (drawing a round of laughter from the audience).

http://gigaom.com/2013/03/06/coursera-credentials-today-full-coursera-powered-degrees-tomorrow/