Serendipity35

I came across this "Web Accessibility MOOC for Online Educators (WAMOE)." Although there are no upcoming dates for the next live offering of WAMOE in D2L Open Courses, the site at https://weba11ymooc.wordpress.com contains all course content and activities that have been used in the MOOC. 

I know that many online educators are interested in learning about how to make their courses more available to students who struggle with web accessibility issues, but may not know where to go for information. This free MOOC, sponsored by Portland Community College and D2L, provides a free professional development opportunity to help eLearning professionals meet the challenges of improving accessibility in online learning.

I believe that using this resource in conjunction with a F2F cohort of faculty on a campus would be an excellent way to approach the topics contained in the MOOC. As with any learners in a MOOC, a hybrid approach to using the online resources is often the best approach to increasing completion of the c"course" and eliminating some of the frustrations of learning on your own.

NOTE: Much of the course content was originally developed by Karen Sorensen and other staff at Portland Community College. PCC also freely shares their comprehensive document titled “Web Accessibility Guidelines.” All course content is open licensed by CC-BY, NonCommercial, Share-Alike 3.0 with attribution to Portland Community College and D2L Corporation.

Google has been getting deeper into education, particularly into higher education. For example, their interest in creating a technically skilled, innovative and diverse workforce has moved them into computer science (CS) education.

That is a logical path for the company and they are interested in developing programs, resources, tools and community partnerships which make CS engaging and accessible for all students.

In STEM generally, women and minorities are historically underrepresented and that's true for computer science at the post-secondary level. In the U.S., women and ethnic minorities each represent just 18% of computer science graduates.professional experience.

You would expect Google to have sophisticated analytics, and analytics in online education software is a key feature in an LMS today as a way to understand how students are doing in greater detail than is possible by trying to do it manually. Course Builder offers several built-in analytics that require little set-up and also options for creating custom analytics using Google Analytics and Google BigQuery. They do note that not everything is free - running either type of custom analytics counts against your App Engine quota and can incur costs.

Course Builder is part of their overall education strategy. Check these links for more information:

Open Line Education https://www.google.com/edu/openonline/  

Course Builder Features https://www.google.com/edu/openonline/course-builder/docs/1.10/feature-list.html

One feature is accessibility https://www.google.com/edu/openonline/course-builder/docs/1.10/feature-list.html#accessibility 

Peer Review https://www.google.com/edu/openonline/course-builder/docs/1.10/feature-list.html#peer-review

 

MOOC enrollment surpassed 35 million in 2015 and though the blush is off the MOOC rose, they are clearly a new learning context for many people.

Are they transformative? I believe so, in the ways that they have created new platforms for online learning, reached new audiences and started conversations about alternative forms of learning and even alternatives within traditional education around credits and degrees.

Many of the current offerings labeled as MOOC are more moOC - that is, the numbers are less massive and the courses and content are not really "open" in the original intent and definition of that word.

Certificate-granting MOOCs and ones for college credit and professional development are what I see as the current trends of interest.

But the topic of quality in MOOCs, and online learning in general, has never gone away. Two reports recently examine that consideration.

The Babson annual “Online Report Card” is in its thirteenth (and I read, its final) year. The report's introduction caught my attention because it says that we are at a stage when “distance education is clearly becoming mainstream” and the divide between "online learning" and simply learning is less evident. The report doesn't spend much time on quality and seems to put MOOCs in the same category as other online learning.

The report titled  “In search of quality: Using Quality Matters to analyze the quality of Massive, Open, Online Courses (MOOCs)”  applied the Quality Matters™ higher education rubric (not the Continuing and Professional Development version) to six MOOCs, offered by three providers, Coursera, edX and Udacity.

Was that a fair test?

Critics of MOOCs will point to the result that all six MOOCs failed to meet QM’s passing grade of 85%. The QM rubric standards are grouped into eight dimensions and the MOOCs performed especially poorly at learner interaction and engagement, and learner support.

When my university first started to have students evaluate their online courses at the end of the last century, it used the same criteria and survey that was used for regular classes. That made some sense at first because they wanted to measure one against the other. Online offerings always did well in "the use of technology and media" category, but not very well in some of the face-to-face items such as lectures and teacher engagement.  After a few years, it was clear that a new survey made specifically for online courses was needed. But our online student survey would not be fair to use for a MOOC, especially one that is truly Massive and Open. A well designed course with many thousands of students, using OER, possibly no textbook, and taken for no credit or fees is just not going to be able to be measured against a good online course with a small number of students motivated by tuition, a grade, credits and a degree to be completed.

Efforts the past few years to evaluate MOOCs and establish standards of quality are important, but we have quite a ways to go.

The MOOC has not had very wide usage in secondary schools in the U.S. for a variety of reasons. Acually, online learning in general has not made significant inroads into the pre-college educational segment. 

A recent issue of the studentPOLL, published by the standardized test provider ACT and the consulting firm Art & Science Group, suggests that incoming college students still believe they will pursue higher education by attending most of their courses in person.



My own observation, somewhat contrary to this report, is that there are two uses of online learning - specifically MOOCs - in the pre-college population. One is by students who are self-motivated and want to explore college-level subjects. Second, is use by teachers looking to see what colleges are doing with subjects they teach. That is especially true of computer science, physics and other STEM subjects where teacher may feel a need to update their own learning, and also find materials that they can use in their own classes.

That poll showed that most college-bound high school students are concerned about the quality of online education, although a small percentage are open to the idea of taking some of their courses online. 85 percent of respondents said they wanted to take a majority of their courses in person. Only 6 percent said they were open to the idea of taking half, most or all of them online. About one-third (37 percent) said they could see themselves taking a handful of online courses. (9 percent were undecided.)

What does this mean for colleges that offer fully online programs? Well, they are not going to appeal to most freshman.

Online learning takes some geting used to, both as a student and as a teacher. Perhaps, pre-college programs should use online learning as it is used for many college courses - as a tools to augment face-to-face courses.