My experience taking a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC)
Course name: "Designing a New Learning
Environment", Fall 2012
Instructor: Paul Kim, Assistant Dean for Information
Technology and CTO, Stanford University School of Education.
Course website: http://venture-lab.org/education
This was a 9-week course, recommended by Dean Peter Murray. 18,054 students from all over
the world registered for it. Over halfway through the course only 730 students were
still working on it. I ended up spending every Sunday afternoon or evening during
the rainy October and November months working on the class. I am not aware of a
certificate or any other proof that I could get showing that I completed it.
A. Content that I Found Valuable
1) World inequality database:
2) Non-cognitive skills like willpower and the ability to
set and reach goals are critical but not taught explicitly in school.
3) E-portfolios are becoming more important. Once the
technology is in place for people to share their work, it will become much more
important for job candidates to show what they have made as opposed to showing a transcript that proves they took a particular course.
4) In one assignment we had
to describe an educational challenge, and then after the due date we were to
try to solve a challenge that another student described. When I went looking
for a challenge to solve, I found that another student had described the
elimination of courses by Foothill's CS department! This shows that the
searching ability of the course website was good enough for me to find what I
was interested in.
5) Another local student set
up a study group meeting weekly at Stanford. I was only able to attend once,
but I found it fun to interact face-to-face with real people in such a huge, global, online course.
B. Team Project
The assignment was to "Design a New Learning
Model." We organized ourselves into teams based on our interest, again
using the excellent searching capabilities of the site. I looked for a team organized around project-based learning but found none. So I joined a team whose
goal was to design a professional development workshop for teachers who want to
"flip" their classrooms. In a flipped classroom, students watch lecture at home and do homework assignments with the teacher in the classroom.
I was very lucky that only one person from the team dropped out
(she was the provost of a college in Costa Rica, and the one who chose the topic
in the first place!) The other students were very compatible, not wanting to
work more than 5 hours per week but able to meet via Skype and very motivated
on the subject.
The six of us worked well together, mostly on Skype. Since
Skype is free, we could just work independently while hanging on the phone to
ask questions or discuss when necessary. The other team members came from
Uruguay, Spain, France, Nebraska and Missouri; they were a mixture of teachers
and administrators. We had fun together!
Our team was incredibly lucky to have a self described
"technologist" and instructional support coordinator in Ryan Sullivan
from Missouri. Ryan created a Wordpress website into which we could all deposit
our work. Right now, only two days after our due date, 5 people (our fellow participants in the MOOC) have already reviewed
our work and given us an average of 90%!
Link to our final team project:
C. Links to Learn More About MOOCs
1) Good video on The Future of Learning:
2) What 100 experts think about the future of learning:
3) Directories of other MOOCs:
Coursera:
Udacity:
Stanford Online:
posted by Elaine @ 5:49 PM
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