MOOC: The Seven Year Itch

I am looking forward to speaking at NJEDge.Net's 15th Annual Faculty Showcase on March 28, 2014.

Last year, I spoke about Massive Open Online Courses just ahead of offering one myself. That was "Academia and the MOOC" which was offered with NJEDge.Net through Canvas Network last spring.


This year I will be back as the lunch plenary and I'm calling my talk "MOOC: The Seven Year Itch" since the MOOC is now 7 years old.


If 2012 was the "Year of the MOOC", then what happened in 2013 - and what will become of the MOOC in 2014?


I will give an update on the past year in Massive Open Online Courses and a sense of how they are really impacting education and training.


The morning speaker is Dr. Erin Templeton an Associate professor of English at Converse College and a fellow lover of poetry. But for this audience, it is more that she is a regular contributor to The Chronicle of Higher Education blog, ProfHacker.



The Faculty Showcase is all about best practices from member institutions and is targeted to educators from K-12, higher education, institutional research, and healthcare related teaching as an opportunity to show their work to NJ colleagues.


The event features presentations and posters on technology-mediated instruction.


More event information at njedge.net/activities/facultyshowcase/2014/



Still Questioning MOOCs?

Whether you think they are a game changer or a fad, you have to admit that no other recent development in higher education has captured the imagination of the media and the attention of universities as MOOCs have done.

Are they really a disruptive innovation and, if so, how are they changing higher education? That's what a recent call for papers asks. http://journals.uoc.edu/ojs/index.php/rusc/pages/view/callforpapersenero2014 (Submission deadline: 30 June 2014) Actually, they ask a number of questions:
Why and how do institutions decide to offer MOOCs?  
Who are the learners and what are their patterns of behaviour?   
What are the implications of MOOCs for developing countries?  
What changes are MOOCs stimulating in institutions (e.g. more online learning, shorter programmes/courses, public-private partnerships, etc.)?  
How is evolving technology changing the infrastructure required to offer MOOCs?
MOOCs have spread beyond higher education and are now being offered by a wider range of institutions and organisations – what is their experience?
Are viable business models for MOOCs emerging?

The early big pioneers of big MOOC platforms are still around. In the spring of 2012, Anant Agarwal, a professor of computer science at MIT, taught a course called “Circuits and Electronics.” The course enrolled 155,000 students from 162 countries around the world. Now the head of edX, Agarwal says MOOCs still matter. He thinks that they are a way to share high-level learning widely and supplement (but perhaps not replace) traditional classrooms. He has a vision of blended learning as the ideal learning experience for 21st century students.




Daphne Koller co-founded Coursera with Andrew Ng and got top universities to put some of their most intriguing courses online for free. They do it as a service and as a way to research how people learn.

Coursera measures each student's activity, quizzes, peer-to-peer discussion and grading gives them Big Data on how knowledge is processed.






Next Big Things in Tech

Even if you don't teach tech or work that much with tech in your classes, it's nice to have an idea of what the next big thing in the tech world might be in our schools. But it's difficult to predict. When Smartbrief.com polled readers recently, they asked: "What do you think will be the "next big thing" in technology that might help you be more successful at work, either with students or in your own PD?"


One thing I see that's not in their poll is that there is a trend to call professional development (PD) "professional learning." Semantics?


Here are the poll results:

Automated individualized student education plans  34.67%
Live two-way peer coaching  21.67%
Accurate voice-recognition word processing  17.96%
Spoken language translation without having to type text  11.76%
Holographic projections that don't require monitors  5.88%
Virtual "unconferencing"  4.95%
Semantic personalized Web searching  3.10%