Why Offer MOOCs and Free Online Courses? Alumni

why mooc


I was pleased to see a post on chronicle.com that focuses on one reason I have been promoting the idea that colleges should offer free online courses of any size: Alumni Engagement.

The article by Casey Fabris talks about a Colgate University course, "The Advent of the Atomic Bomb," taught by Karen Harpp. She plans to offer the course for a second time. It is technically not a MOOC because it is not "open" being that is available only to alumni.

They have found that although the atomic bomb doesn't have much resonance with today's traditionally-aged college students, it has a Baby Boomer appeal. 

Colgate's term for these offerings is that they are Fusion Courses. The courses are offered as in-person courses for Colgate students with an additional online component that brings in alumni.

This is Colgate's entry into free online courses of any type or size.

Professor Harpp must have seemed like a natural for this because she had already been alumni, including a few World War II veterans, involved in her course by including them in discussion boards. The Fusion Course pushes that further by involving them in a Twitter re-enactment, a timeline project, and videoconference calls.

I like that Colgate had set their enrollment goal at 238 students (the atomic mass of uranium) and ended up with 380 alumni. A second course on "Living Writers" had 800 participants that included about 678 alumni plus participants from the community and book clubs that were allowed to enroll.

Colgate is not the first to offer courses to alumni and many of the truly massive MOOCs with 100k+ participants probably had alumni enrolling in their alma mater's offerings.  Harvard University began offering such courses to graduates last year and the article notes that the University of Wisconsin at Madison plans to offer six courses.

These course offerings are a good way to have alumni and the local community connect to the campus and its current life. I have retired friends in North Carolina and Florida who regularly take courses and sit in on lectures face-to-face and online with their local colleges. The often mentioned and less often offered "lifelong learning" opportunities at colleges needs to increase.

More about the Colgate course at colgate.edu/alumni/atomic


Are These The Consumer Tech Trends for 2015?

According to Amber Macarthur, these will be the "5 Life Changing Tech Trends for 2015." These lists are always arguable and rarely accurate, but still interesting.


1. Connected Cars - Are you ready to get out of your car and then let it drive on and find a parking space, park and wait for you to call it so that it will come back to you?

2. Wearable Technology - Eager to wear technology? Forget about the time and your steps - check your bank account on your wrist.

3. Consumer Robots - Vacuuming the house? Hah, that's baby steps.

4. Smart Homes - Yes, your NEST thermostat controlled from your smartphone is cool. Now it is time for your washing machine to tell you at work that a load is finished.

5. Visual Social - Instagram, Pinterest, Snapchat and whatever pops up this year is all about visual. Instagram has 300 million monthly active users with approximately 70 million photos shared every day.


Do I sound a bit sarcastic and doubtful?  You bet.

Death By (or of?) PowerPoint

As I write this post, Prezi is bragging they have over 50 million users and lots of higher education presentations. I'm still not a Prezi user and I've seen presentations using it that made me dizzy with all the movement. But I understand why people are looking to get out of PowerPoint which is so often criticized.



Honestly, I think the criticism of almost all bad PowerPoint presentations should be directed at its creator and/or the presenter rather than the software. "Death by PowerPoint" doesn't occur because of the program.



Web apps like Haiku Deck and Canva are getting some attention now and some people say this is the beginning of the end of PowerPoint as the main tool for slidedecks. Apple has always tried to make their Keynote program the other choice, but it was initially limited to Mac users. They have introduced other app versions and an iCloud version for the web.



Microsoft has also recently launched its Prezi competitor called Sway.



Do you remember the early days of PowerPoint? Did you know that it was originally designed for the Macintosh computer? The initial release was called "Presenter", but in 1987 it was renamed to "PowerPoint" due to problems with trademarks.



The idea of slides comes from what the program was designed to replace - 35 mm photo slides.



Back then, and still today, many of the best presentations using slidedecks focus on images rather than slides full of text.



When I started working at NJIT in 2000, professors were still bringing 35 mm slides to media services to be converted to .jpgs so that they could use them in PowerPoint. As you might imagine, the College of Architecture and Design had many tray of beautiful slides that they used in lectures.



There are plenty of online articles, tutorials and posts about how to make a good presentation, but I don't think that PowerPoint (or some web or app version of it) is going away.



That old phrase GIGO (Garbage in, garbage out) that came from computer science applies to presentations too. Input bad data ("garbage in") and produce bad  output ("garbage out"). Just add the presenter to the GIGO mix.



 


Increasing Gender Diversity in STEM

Less than 30% of tech jobs are held by women, and that number is even smaller for leadership positions.


6 takeaways from smartblogs.com/education/




  1. Many tech companies are working hard to improve the industry’s gender gap, releasing diversity numbers to the public and launching hiring initiatives geared specifically toward women. But for real change to happen, it needs to start earlier – specifically, in STEM education.

  2. Current trends suggest that more women are studying STEM now than ever before – in fact, in 2010, women represented 50.3% of all science and engineering bachelor’s degrees. But there’s still a long way to go when it comes to getting – and keeping – women interested in tech.

  3. A culture that is far friendlier to men than it is to women and a glass ceiling that’s worse than in almost any other industry. According to a recent study by Penn, Schoen and Berland, nearly two-thirds of teens have never considered a career in engineering. Another study by the Girl Scouts of America revealed that only 13% of female teens say that a career in STEM would be their first choice. The reason? They’re not as interested by technology as their male counterparts, and they don’t see the benefits of getting involved.

  4. Historical efforts to get women and girls more involved with technology have been focused on making it easier. But going forward, improving gender diversity in technology won’t only be about making STEM more accessible for girls and women. It will need to be about making it more interesting, too.

  5. Experts agree that one of the most important factors to getting girls interested in STEM is doing it at a young age. From the toys and games they play with to the guidance they receive in grade school, early actions and choices have a surprising effect on girls’ educational and career paths later in life. 

  6. In grades K-12, girls take high-level math and science courses at similar rates as their male peers – and they perform well in them. However, those numbers drop off dramatically the undergraduate level – particularly in the fields of math, computer science and engineering. Colleges and universities are going to have to work hard to get and retain more women in STEM classes. One way Harvey Mudd is trying to improve its numbers? Offering more introductory computer science courses and hosting events and conferences for women in tech. And it’s worked – 40% of Harvey Mudd’s computer science majors are women, far more than at any other co-ed school.