Wow, this week was packed with information. I really enjoyed Chris’ video on Course Design. I found her overview of Clare Major’s Classification Chain will be helpful in considering elements of my course, especially when constructing the learning environment and the nature of the communication network. It does seem to me that using Blackboard does somewhat limit my decisions on some of these element. (Chris – could you seen me a link to Major’s research? I wasn’t able to find the Diigo site).
After reading the study on distance learners, I had a few thoughts. On the topic of open or closed classes, wouldn’t the policies of the college/university dictate who could access your course? Does “open” mean “free” to students who are the distance learners -not earning credit? This seems to me the model for many of the MOOCs out there today. Is this something that would be in the interest of educational institutions, especially during times of shrinking resources? I did like the idea of having and open hybrid course where students at your school could interact and collaborate specifically with students from other parts of the country or the world. How great it would be to teach my Middle Eastern history class and have the students engage (through blogs, Facebook, or messaging) on important topics like civil society, democracy, and Islam in politics with students who actually live in the Middle East!
I’m assuming that the Mediated Cultures website at Kansas State University is an “open” class? It appears to be an aggregation site for blog posts, responses, videos, etc. It has no coherence to it, but must make sense to the participants. I can see that the content is student generated and moderated. I’m interested to see other impressions of this site.
I really liked George Siemens’ post on the elearnspace blog. I’ve seen his writings and lectures on other educational websites concerning MOOCs. The eight points he made concerning the theory behind MOOCS was really thought provoking. Here are a few insights/thoughts I had when looking over these points:
- Started to read about Connectivist and Constructivist prospectives on education, then started to read about Dewey and Montessori and an hour went by – a well spent hour.
- MOOCs should rely on knowledge that is generative not declarative. This does inspire me to increase the amount of student generated material in my online class. Could you have a class that is solely based on students generating all of their own content?
- Siemens also states, “In a traditional course, the instructor creates knowledge coherence by bounding the domain of knowledge that the learners will explore: i.e. this is the course text, here are the readings, quizzes will validate that you’ve learned what I think is important, etc. ” Can we see textbooks, tests and quizzes, etc. as boundaries or limits to learning? Are there better alternatives in the digital age?
- I liked that he made the point that student interaction in MOOCs is distributed through many channels (Twitter, blogs, etc.) It might be interesting to have one or two methods of interaction within your online course, but to encourage students to branch out and discover other ways of sharing ideas. I’d have to think about how to implement this.
- He also states that MOOCs will help foster the creation of “autonomous and self-regulated” learners. This seems to me some of what the new Common Core in lower education is addressing. I know that I teach critical thinking and the effective communication of ideas in my history classes; could I be doing more to create autonomous and self-regulated learners?
There has been much said about MOOCs in the last few years and it seems that the energy and money that was once behind them has slowed in the last year. There is no way to see how the future of education might be impacted by them. I do see quite a bit of resistance to them by faculty and institutions around the US. Here is another overview of MOOCS from the Ted Blog: http://blog.ted.com/2014/01/27/whats-next-for-moocs/
Ok, now to check out Storify and rapgenius?