Serendipity35

Justin Reich on Education Weekly has been blogging about what the last two years of MOOC research seems to tell us about how to improve the design of courses. Here is my bulleted list version:

1. MOOC students are diverse, but trend towards auto-didacts

2. MOOC students value flexibility, but benefit when they engage frequently

3. The best predictor of persistence and completion is intention, though every activity predicts every other activity

4. MOOC students (tell us they) leave because they get busy with other things, but we may be able to help them stay on track

5. Students learn more from doing than watching

6. Lots of student learning activities are happening beyond our observation: including note-taking, socializing, and using other references

Improving student learning outcomes will require measuring learning, experimenting with different approaches, and baking research into courses from the beginning

REich is doing a separate post for each with data and commentary that is worth reading. For example, in his fifth post, Students learn more from doing than watching he writes that if we have a choice to take two different approaches to building a method to produce MOOCs, which path seems to produce better results?

A. Make a big investment in video production (editors, videographers etc.) and use basic assessment and discussion features available through the MOOC platform.

B. Focus on developing interactive activities with instructors doing simple screencasts or lectures.

You'd have to agree with Reich that if you have limited resources (money and people) "B' is the way to go. But even if you have the resources, there is evidence that you should go with "B."

A group from Carnegie Mellon University published a paper "Learning is not a Spectator Sport: Doing is Better than Watching for Learning in a MOOC" in which they compared students who did activities in a MOOC with students who watched videos. They found that students who did activities outperformed those who did not, even those who watched lots of videos. Despite the heavy investment and emphasis on video in many MOOCs, students need to do things in order to learn.

Do you have a big, "Duh. We knew that" reaction to that conclusion? Maybe, but plenty of MOOCs and just plain old online courses are enamored with bigtime video productions for online learning.

 

What  does personalized learning look like? You can find definitions online, like this one from edglossary.org:

"The term personalized learning, or personalization, refers to a diverse variety of educational programs, learning experiences, instructional approaches, and academic-support strategies that are intended to address the distinct learning needs, interests, aspirations, or cultural backgrounds of individual students. Personalized learning is generally seen as an alternative to so-called “one-size-fits-all” approaches to schooling in which teachers may, for example, provide all students in a given course with the same type of instruction, the same assignments, and the same assessments with little variation or modification from student to student. Personalized learning may also be called student-centered learning, since the general goal is to make individual learning needs the primary consideration in important educational and instructional decisions, rather than what might be preferred, more convenient, or logistically easier for teachers and schools."

As an alternative in defning this approach, 5 colleges that are trying classroom experiments in it have produced videos with the edtech blog e-Literate (and some bucks from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation) that feature some "case studies" of projects (most also supported by the Gates Foundation).

All of the videos will total three and a half hours and are expected to be posted by the end of June.

Michael Feldstein, founder of the blog and a host of the videos, says he doesn’t even like the term “personalized learning” describing it with the less-buzzworthy term "technology-assisted differentiated instruction.”

More at http://www.e-literate.tv

Looking at this infographic on the "7 Characteristics of a Digitally Competent Teacher," I can imagine that most teacher would add to the list.

1 You can integrate digital skills into everyday life: digital skills are transferable.

2 You have a balanced attitude: you are a teacher not a techie.

3 You are open to using and trying new stuff: find digital tools and explore how they work.

4 You are a digital communicator: you can use email and social media with ease.

5 You know how to do a digital assessment: you’re a sound judge of the quality of information, apps and tools

6 You understand and respect privacy: you treat personal data with the respect it deserves

7 You are a digital citizen: you know how to behave online appropriately and you’ll pass it on to your pupils

I agree immediately with all of them, but #4 sounds dated. You need to be comfortable with a lot more than email and social media today, though it would be hard to list the definitive programs or apps that are required to pass the competency test.



What would you add to the list?

Find more education infographics on e-Learning Infographics

I just discovered this 2-year old school via an article in The Chronicle (unfortunately, mostly behind a subscriber paywall)  "In France, a Free Tech School Shakes Up Higher Education"

It is a nonprofit school known simply as "42." (I do like that the name comes from Douglas Adams’s novel The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, in which the number 42 is the answer to the ultimate question - though no one knows what the question is.)

The school doesn’t provide a degree or charge tuition (MOOC-like). It offers only a training program in computer science. In its 2 years, it has been very popular and has had its own shots at disrupting teaching, credentials and technology training pedagogy.

Unlike MOOCs, it is not "open." They have had 70,000 people from Europe and beyond apply for 900 openings. That makes them, in the American way of ranking, more selective than the Ivy League universities.

The whole enterprise would seem less disruptive in Europe where government-subsidized public universities with low or no tuition is a reality. Still, a school without grades, diplomas, or even textbooks and a regular faculty is not the norm anywhere in higher education.

Are universities worried about this? Not much. As with MOOCs, higher education is curious but not worried as long as students and parents are willing to still pay lots of money to get that degree.

But Nicolas Sadirac, one of its four founders, says official accreditation is not what 42’s leaders aspire to — in fact, they shun it. "We don’t want to have to play by those rules," says Mr. Sadirac, who describes France’s universities and vocational schools as lethargic knowledge factories that pump out rote learners.

"42’s goal is not to fill our students’ heads with facts and theories," he says, "but to help them become creative innovators who can solve complex problems together with peers."

Some have compared 42 to offerings like the American Codecademy rather than to colleges.

Sadirac is 42’s director and a former university administrator, but it is Xavier Niel (who made his money in Internet and telecommunications) who donated $90 million to start 42 and rent facilities, hardware and pay for students and staffing.

10 Notes About 42

1. Admissions does not require a degree like the baccalauréat used in France to graduate high school and enter college.

2. Applicants are 18-30 years old

3. If you do well on their online aptitude test, you are invited to 42 in Paris as finalists.

4. Each finalist is given a coding problem and four weeks to complete it.

5. About 4000 finalists are then cut to under 1000.

6. There are no formal classes.

7. Students choose projects solve increasingly difficult problems working in teams of two to five,

8. Solve the problems and pass. If you don't, you fail.

9. Students work at their own pace but are expected to "graduate" within two to four years.

10. The goal is jobs - especially in France’s tech-software-engineering sector, which lacks highly skilled personnel