Online Learning Update

by IVN

The State Department is launching Part II of Shaping the Way We Teach English, a massive open online course (MOOC) for English as a Foreign Language (EFL) educators, on May 12, 2014. By strengthening the quality of English teaching around the world, the Department of State hopes to open economic opportunities in science, business, technology, and higher education for more of our international partners and offer skills for a better future. Part I of the Shaping the Way We Teach English MOOC, completed in April 2014, successfully enrolled over 18,000 participants worldwide. Designed both for professionals already working in the area of EFL and for those pursuing the field as a career, both MOOC sessions assist EFL educators worldwide in updating and augmenting their teaching methods. When educators employ the teaching methods and technologies learned throughout the course, they improve leaning outcomes for their students and build leadership among their peers.

http://www.imperialvalleynews.com/index.php/news/latest-news/8631-u-s-department-of-state-to-offer-second-massive-online-course-for-english-language.html

by Associated Press

The online courses that universities offer to the public were once hailed as an innovation that could provide free college education to the global masses. Now many in the industry are scaling back expectations, saying they don’t perform as well as supporters had hoped. Yet two Minnesota schools still see value in them and are pressing on, Minnesota Public Radio reported Monday. “It’s a startling innovation in education,” said University of Minnesota Provost Karen Hanson. “And figuring out how best to deploy it … is something that’s learned through experience.” The university offers more than a half-dozen MOOCs, while the College of St. Scholastica in Duluth offers three. St. Scholastica’s three courses target working professionals in health care. Those who enroll can earn free continuing education credits. “Our plans are not grand,” said Don Wortham, vice president for strategic initiatives. “We’re looking for ways to introduce segments of the consuming public to Scholastica, and we’ll do it a few hundred or a few thousand at a time — and be very happy with that.”

http://www.crookstontimes.com/article/20140506/NEWS/140509789/10057/NEWS

By Meghan Drake-The Washington Times

“There is a lot of speculation that [MOOCs] were going to change the face of higher education. That’s not what’s happening,” said Jeff Seaman, co-director of Babson Survey Research Group. Mr. Seaman and fellow Babson researcher I. Elaine Allen conducted a survey charting fresh doubts about MOOCs as long-term higher-education supplements. Their study, which polled chief academic officers at 2,831 colleges and universities about online education, reported that 39 percent say they do not believe that MOOCs are sustainable models for their schools — up from 26 percent in 2012. “There still is not a clear business model to why I should do this,” Mr. Seaman said. Coursera co-founder Andrew Ng notes that half of MOOC students who complete the first homework assignment wind up completing the entire course. But skeptics say the virtues of MOOCs also are emerging as vices. “Two words are wrong in ‘MOOC’: massive and open,” Stanford President John Hennessy said in a widely noted interview with the Financial Times.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/feb/9/big-plan-on-campus-is-dropping-out/

By Eric Fredericksen and Mark Zupan, Business Week

Here’s what we have learned. Perhaps the chief benefit of MOOCs is simply the visibility it provides to help reach new customers, untethered from geographic restrictions. While enrolling in these online classes through Coursera involves less of a commitment than enrolling in (and paying for) an on-campus course, we have had more than 20 times more students sign up for our online courses than are taking classes in person. Of our 200,000-plus virtual enrollees, who hail from 150 different countries, 44 percent never heard of us, while another 52 percent had, but that was the extent of their connection to us. Enrollment in a MOOC is not equivalent to taking a traditional on-campus course. It is more analogous to bookmarking a Web page.

http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-03-12/what-massive-online-courses-do-well-and-where-they-falter

By Janel Davis, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Georgia Tech launched its massive online degree program last Wednesday with a first session cohort of 375 students. The Master of Science in Computer Science program is the first degree program from an accredited university offered solely in a massive online course format, university officials said. Most online students will pay less than $7,000 for the graduate degree, compared to $45,000 for on-campus students.

http://www.ajc.com/news/news/first-massive-online-degree-program-begins-wednesd/ncnyF/

By Ari Levy, Bloomberg

Harvey Mudd College, a highly-rated engineering, math and science school in Claremont, California, to join the party. Mudd secured a grant from an anonymous donor last year to start a massive online program and hired a recent graduate, Elly Schofield, to run it. But this one won’t be so massive. Mudd’s courses — one for middle school computer science and another for high school calculus-based physics — are being developed to help teachers help their students rather than targeting students directly. A middle school computer science teacher, for example, could use video lectures from a Mudd professor along with recommended discussion topics to supplement classes. The courses will be available in the second half of the year. “I discovered as soon as I joined up on the project that this was not going to be a traditional MOOC,” said Schofield, 22, who graduated from Mudd last year with a degree in math. “It’s designed to be a tool for teachers who want to use it within a classroom.”

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-01-14/massive-online-education-gets-less-massive.html

by Technology Review

Not only does student participation decline dramatically throughout the new generation of web-based courses but the involvement of teachers in online discussions makes it worse. Today, Christopher Brinton at Princeton University and a few pals offer their view. These guys have studied the behaviour in online discussion forums of over 100,000 students taking massive open online courses (or MOOCs).

And they have depressing news. They say that participation falls precipitously and continuously throughout a course and that almost half of registered students never post more than twice to the forums. What’s more, the participation of a teacher doesn’t improve matters. Indeed, they say there is some evidence that a teacher’s participation in an online discussion actually increases the rate of decline.

http://www.technologyreview.com/view/522816/data-mining-exposes-embarrassing-problems-for-massive-open-online-courses/

by Carl Straumsheim, Inside Higher Ed

The Georgia Institute of Technology has admitted its first 401 students to the low-cost online master’s degree program in computer science created in partnership with massive open online course provider Udacity, and the January launch will be the first step toward seeing how scalable such a program can be. The pilot launches Jan. 14, 2014, and may enroll as many as 10,000 students over the next few years. “We will judiciously increase the size,” said Zvi Galil, dean of College of Computing. Degree-seeking students may in the future number in the several hundreds, not thousands, he said, but at this point the university is operating on “assumptions on scalability, and nobody really knows.”

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/12/13/georgia-tech-admits-first-cohort-ahead-online-masters-degree-program-launch

BY LARS THORVALDSEN, Miami Herald

The American Association of University Professors says ownership of online courses, including MOOCs, is a pressing issue. Among the concerns are that institutions will change online courses created by professors and that professors will sign away their intellectual property rights to the courses they create. Doing so may have long-term consequences, as a professor might not be able to use a course after leaving his or her institution, the organization said.

http://www.miamiherald.com/2013/12/12/3812743/massive-online-courses-pose-possibilities.html

By Kyla Calvert, KPBS

Elite universities have been experimenting with massive, open, online courses, or MOOCs, for a couple of years now. UC San Diego is joining them. On a spring day the seats in a UC San Diego auditorium were mostly empty. Stephen Mayfield has been teaching his Introduction to Biofuels class for three years. The seats, he said, really only fill up on test days. But his students aren’t exactly skipping class. Most just listen to the lectures online, ask questions over email or during office hours, he said. Mayfield thinks moving most of the class online this way is pretty exciting — but not because it makes his students’ schedules more flexible.

http://www.kpbs.org/news/2013/oct/31/uc-san-diego-professors-test-waters-massive-open-o/

by DOUGLAS BELKIN and CAROLINE PORTER, Wall Street Journal
Big employers such as AT&T Inc. and Google Inc. are helping to design and fund the latest round of low-cost online courses, a development that providers say will open the door for students to earn inexpensive credentials with real value in the job market. New niche certifications being offered by providers of massive open online courses, or MOOCs, are aimed at satisfying employers’ specific needs. Available at a fraction of the cost of a four-year degree, they represent the latest crack in the monopoly traditional universities have in credentialing higher education. “The common denominator [among the new MOOC certification programs] is that there really is an interest in finding credentials that don’t require a student to buy the entire degree,” said Sebastian Thrun, the Stanford University computer-science professor who co-founded Udacity, a MOOC with 1.6 million enrolled students in 200 countries. “This is really democratizing education at its best.”

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324807704579087840126695698.html

By Joe McKendrick, Smart Planet

A new twist on massive open online courses — a “synchronous massive online course” (SMOC) — is now underway at The University of Texas at Austin. Unlike MOOCs, which are mainly off-campus, the university’s SMOC is offered both to registered students as well as off-campus participants. While many universities offer online courses, these are typically closed to non-enrolled participants. The SMOC, which launched this semester, represents another next phase in the disruption of higher education. The course, Introduction to Psychology, will be streamed two nights a week, live on the internet. Students are encouraged to ask questions and interact with the instructors and their classmates in real time through interactive chat rooms. Participants earn three hours of transferable academic credit that will appear on an official transcript of the university.

http://www.smartplanet.com/blog/bulletin/more-educational-disruption-synchronous-massive-online-course/29050

 by Tricia Bishop, The Baltimore Sun

The University of Maryland University College expects to be among the first wave of schools this academic year awarding transfer credit to those who have taken — and can prove they learned from — certain “massive open online courses,” known as MOOCs. The school, which targets working adults with its own online classes, and six others nationwide have agreed to track student progress as part of a research study gauging how well the MOOCs, which are relatively new to the education world, prepared the transfers for a more traditional learning experience. It’s all part of a broader effort to get beyond the hype surrounding MOOCs to determine whether the classes have the potential, as some have said, to transform higher education in the same way the Internet revolutionized publishing, retailing and journalism.

http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/bs-md-mooc-20130815,0,3456893.story

by Library Intelligencer

The Hyperlinked Library is an open, participatory institution that welcomes user input and creativity. It is built on human connections and conversations. The organizational chart is flatter and team-based. The collections grow and thrive via user involvement. Librarians are tapped in to user spaces and places online to interact, have presence, and point the way. The hyperlinked library is human. Communication, externally and internally, is in a human voice. The librarians speak to users via open, transparent conversation.

http://mooc.hyperlib.sjsu.edu/

http://blogs.unimelb.edu.au/libraryintelligencer/2013/09/02/the-hyperlinked-library-a-massive-open-online-course-for-lis-professionals/

By Michael A Peters, Truthout

Ernst & Young’s Universities of the Future carries the line, “A thousand year old industry on the cusp of profound change.” The report suggests that the current Australian university model “will prove unviable in all but a few cases.” It identifies five major “drivers of change”: democratization of knowledge and access, contestability of markets and funding, digital technologies, global mobility and integration with industry.

http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/18120-massive-open-online-courses-and-beyond-the-revolution-to-come

By Peter Norvig, Scientific American

Educators have known for 30 years that students perform better when given one-on-one tutoring and mastery learning—working on a subject until it is mastered, not just until a test is scheduled. Success also requires motivation, whether from an inner drive or from parents, mentors or peers. Will the rise of massive open online courses (MOOCs) quash these success factors? Not at all. In fact, digital tools offer our best path to cost-effective, personalized learning.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=how-to-make-online-courses-massively-personal-peter-norvig

by Garry Kranz, Workforce

Recruiting company Aquent is using a new twist on online learning to help its clients hire next-generation Web developers. Faced with job requests from companies that it could not fill, the Boston-based specialized recruiter for ad agencies in 2012 launched a massive open online course, or MOOC, on skills related to HTML5, the latest version of the markup language that defines how Internet content gets structured. Ad agencies need Web developers well-versed in mobile technologies such as HTML5, yet many code writers seem to lack the necessary skills to compete for available jobs, said Alison Farmer, Aquent’s vice president of learning and development. “Even though unemployment was high, companies were telling us that most candidates weren’t qualified,” Farmer said. “We wondered: ‘How do we take candidates that may have been competitive a year ago and help them acquire emerging skills?’”

http://www.workforce.com/articles/9295-online-learning-gets-massive-open

by WVU Today

West Virginia University Provost Michele Wheatly is not given to hyperbole. So when she calls massive open online courses “the most exciting academic innovation in 30 years,” colleagues and campus communities should take notice. “There is a lot of hype surrounding MOOCs,” Wheatly said, “both negative and positive. But what I’m thrilled about is that their advent has stimulated a serious discussion about the science of learning.” When Wheatly organized a panel for chief academic officers from the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities this summer on the MOOC phenomenon, she thought it was time to adopt a proactive stance and redirect the conversation toward strategies for online course development that would improve student learning.

http://wvutoday.wvu.edu/n/2013/08/08/wvu-provost-sees-opportunity-for-new-normal-in-trend-of-massive-online-open-courses

by AISHWARIYA S., the Hindu

Futurelearn offers us the opportunity to explore a new online delivery channel, focussing on a different way to structure learning materials and learner support from that offered by Coursera. Additionally, we are able to work collaboratively with many of our peer universities in the U.K. who are not Coursera partners. We wish to reach young learners in U.K. schools, especially those who are educationally disadvantaged, and Futurelearn will be a good platform for that sort of educational outreach. We will offer more courses at high school/ entry to university level, although there will be some courses at more advanced levels. The subject range will be wide and include biology, physics, bio-medical engineering, modern art, literature and history.

http://www.thehindu.com/features/education/future-is-online/article4985402.ece

by David Hamilton, the WHIR

MOOCs are delivered through a Virtual Learning Environment, an application that enables an educator to run online lectures, deliver multimedia, administer tests, assign homework, mark assignments, and grade students. A good deal of the potential of MOOCs is dependent on these VLEs, but also the hosting infrastructure and technology that supports the VLE as it delivers a MOOC to thousands and tens-of-thousands of students. There are plenty of options for an educational institution to consider when rolling out a MOOC: join a course aggregator network like Coursera, spend time and money on building their own solution, buy proprietary software and hosting, use Google Course-Builder which runs on Google App Engine, or host an open-source app like Moodle.

http://www.thewhir.com/web-hosting-news/handling-hefty-course-loads-the-hosting-infrastructure-behind-massive-open-online-courses

by the BBC

When the internet hits an industry the result is usually pretty dramatic. Newcomers with revolutionary business models blow away the old established players. Think what happened to Kodak when photography went digital, what happened to high street book shops when Amazon got going. Now it is the turn of higher education, and not even the cleverest professors can say for sure how this is going to play out. Right now this change is focused on the Mooc – shorthand for massive open online courses. The technology that allows one professor to teach not just one student but 100,000 really changes the economics of higher education”

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-23069542