Applied Abstractions

Jay Cross at the Internet Time Blog has compiled 195 posts about MOOCs . Plenty by George Siemens, who is currently teaching CN-1370-LAK2013 Learning Analytics and Knowledge 2013   (which is pretty great so far), a few by Stephen Downes, but most seem to be a bit older. With MOOCs changing, seemingly, everyday , current articles are necessary.

Two events today reminded me about the necessity of meeting new people, and building connections. I've been focused over the last few months on courseware development, a LMS upgrade, Google Apps for Education integration, numerous MOOCs I've been taking, and the odds and ends of helping to run online courses. Growing my network has not been a very high priority. The first reminder was finishing Sonia Sotomayor's memoirs  My Beloved World . In it she details a rough upbringing, and charts her trajectory through Princeton, Yale Law, being an ADA, private practice, volunteer work, and ends with her entering a federal judgeship. She is very frank about growing up in the Bronx, and discusses difficult and emotional issues she lived through. She is equally frank about how her network of people helped her to get where she is today. After entering Princeton it seems that opportunities opened up to her because she naturally enjoyed meeting people. She discusses how when meeting so

Will Oreums' article Online Class on How To Teach Online Classes Goes Laughably Awry on Slate is a bit too snarky for its own good. It does sum up the recent press about the course fairly well, but he does get a few things wrong; In other words, Morrison concludes, "The honeymoon with MOOCs is over." A Twitter hashtag for the course,  #foemooc , stands as a testament to the wreckage. Most of the tweets on #foemooc are a testament to the amount or reporting about the issue, not the MOOC itself. Right after the course was canceled, there were around 30-40 tweets from students about the course. As of the writing of this, most tweets are either news organizations riding the story or Instructional Designers proclaiming the necessity of 'intelligent' (in their view) design for courses of all sizes. The failure of a Coursera course about Coursera courses is clearly an embarrassment for company and concept alike.  The course wasn't about Coursera courses spec

So this is an interesting development, just received this email; Dear Robert Weston, We want all students to have the highest quality learning experience. For this reason, we are temporarily suspending the "Fundamentals of Online Education: Planning and Application" course in order to make improvements. We apologize for any inconvenience that this may cause. We will inform you when the course will be reoffered. Yours,  Fatimah This being the first week, there were a few issues that seemed solvable. Group assignments disappearing in a shared Google Spreadsheet, discussion forums not allowing you to refine your search by sub topics, and student complaints about 'chaos' were surmountable. The one area that remained consistent, but questionable, was the content. The 'brain based learning' paper I mentioned in my last post was suspect.