Author: Stephen Downes

 Summary of a panel with  Maria H. Andersen (Canvas by Instructure), Relly Brandman (Coursera), Rebecca Petersen (EdX), Barbara E. Truman (Academic Partnerships) Question: How do you think the MOOC will evolve over the next two years Maria: it’s a bit hard to say, we’re in an experimental phase, we’re mostly

Summary of a presentation by Phillip D. Long, University of Queensland Role of the University: – Drew Faust, Harvard: it’s not really about what’s happening term by term or even graduatiomn, but it’s about the experience with us that shapes their life long learning and which transfers a culture

Summary of a presentation by Rebecca Griffiths, ITHAKA Why did we start this study? It’s very difficult to engage students ‘in the wild’. They come in with a great deal of different backgrounds. So we’ve chosen to study the efficacy of MOOCs inside an institutional environment. Secondly, we want to

Summary of a presentation from Stacey L. Clawson, Anh Nguyen, Gates Foundation (Stacey) MOOCs are one of the trends that are top of mind for institutional leaders. Institutions are pursuing MOOCs for a variety of reasons: to increase brand, to improve completion, to understand their effect on teaching and

 Summary of a presentation by speaker Ellen Junn Technically our MOOCs aren’t MOOCs any more, because we’re doing them for college credit, so there’s a fee involved. Also not all the things we’re doing are completely online. Survey mof the major MOOC providers: What we wanted to do

Summar of a presentation by Lori Breslow (MIT), Jennifer DeBoer (MIT), Andrew Ho (Harvard)(Andrew) Although open sources and online teaching is not new in a passive way, open learning as an active process is new, so there hasn’t been a lot of research. Most of the research has been about

Summary of a presentation from Amy Collier (Stanford) and Jane Manning (Stanford) Eventifier tweets: http://www.eventifier.co/event/elifocus/tweets?page=18 (Jane) If you haven’t seen it already, EdX has announced it will be releasing its entire platform on GPL on June 1, and Stanford announced it will be collaborating with them on this. Let me

Summary of a presentation by Derek Bruff, Vanderbilt University, @derekbruff We have had 173,810 students enrolled in VU’s five courses as of March 27, 2013. It doesn’t mean everybody is finishing these MOOCs, but it does mean there these huge global learning communities forming, and I want to look

Summary of a presentation from Jason Mock http://moxbox.info/presentations/2013/march/whats-it-us-benefits-campus-courses-running-mooc Let’s talk about the reasons institutions and people are getting involved in MOOCs  We can look at brand reputation, or just keeping up, for institutions. But I want to focus on the pedagogical innovations, influences on campus courses and improvements

Summary of a presentation by Cathy Sandeen, Centre for Education, Attainment and Innovation, ACE I am actually a MOOC completer – I thought it was a good idea to experience a MOOC first-hand. First a word about American Council on Education – we are a Washington D.C. based

Summary of a presentation by Seth Anderson (Duke), Amy Collier (Stanford), Cassandra Horlii (California Institute of Technology) Amy: What is unique about online learning in MOOCs? Kurt Vonnegut once said “I want to stand as close to the edge as possible without falling over.” MOOCs are taking institutions

Summary of a presentation by Peter Struck I (Peter) am coming from a background as a practitioner, beginning especially with web 2.0 courses. We then offered a course over Coursera, 50,000 clicked ‘ok’, and about a quarter of them are active – it’s more in one course that

Summary of a presentation by Phil Hill and Michael Feldstein. Phil – there’s so much hype or madness around MOOCs, and there’s a lot of discussion from people who were not previously involved in online education. They sometimes act like online education was invented in the last two years. And

I had a brief chat with Georges Corriveau this morning that got me to thinking about the future of work. Specifically, I was thinking to myself, if I were just starting out in the world, where would I focus my interests? I think back 35 years or so when I

I was asked (along with Dave Cormier and George Siemens): “How might it be possible to show that cMOOCs are effective for learning, in the sense of providing evidence that institutions might accept so as to support opening up more courses to outside participants (a la ds106, Alec Couros’ EC&I 831,

I don’t think Wendman’s comments really respond to the concerns expressed in the Mayes article. Mark Wendman’s argument is essentially:– the delays have been caused by the protests in the U.S., now four years old, and we should really have gotten past that by now. We should just get on

Brief quotable answers to a request for input to a forthcoming article on open online learning. Do you want to reduce the ‘lurkers’ as used in an article on your website for any reason? Which is to say, how can the courses be designed to minimise the drop-outs if at

Another response to a Joanne Jacobs blog post, this one called ‘To fix college, ban ‘I feel’‘ When I was working for Texas Instruments I took a number of courses at their learning centre (Job Entry Subsystem, Multiple Virtual Storage, fun stuff like that). One of the courses was a