Kategorie: E-Learning

The session „MOOCs and Ubiquitous Computing“ (June 22nd) was very interesting and informative although unfortunately we had massive sound problems. I already had looked at the slides before the session which was a good thing because I was distracted by a nearby major fire. Thankfully (now we know) the huge black cloud of smoke from 4.800 tons of burning styrofoam granulate wasn’t dangerous, but the fire-fighting operations went on for hours. Back to the session.

Bryan Alexander told about 3 different possible futures and there were many convincing arguments for each: 1. MOOCs exacerbate problems 2. Open world 3. MOOC bubble pops

• The star cult in MOOCs and the concern about face-to-face education only available for elites
• More access to information, more creativity, academic content „unleashed“ on the world, information literacy becoming even more important – on the other hand outsourcing, offshoring, less privacy and the problem of unclear authorship
• There are already many MOOC platforms (mostly xMOOCs), many more are on the way but will they succeed or go bust? At the moment, the media coverage is remarkably positive – what happens if that changes? (and I believe that is likely)

My conclusion: Whatever happens in the future, Universities have to think now about their position regarding MOOCs and how they affect learning.

And therefore it’s good to be informed – there is plenty of  literature regarding the topic MOOCs. I have lots of bookmarks and especially like the MOOC field report from the University of Edinburgh because of the detailed summary of their experiences with Coursera.

The task for week 3 was a literature study on learning and teaching online. I didn’t put the focus on listing articles but on how to find literature and keep up-to-date with the topic e-learning. Enjoy.

PDF mit Verlinkungen:
Literature Study on Teaching and Learning online

Yesterday afternoon I joined in the Stephen Downes Moodle MOOC session. A colleague from work (who had participated in CCK08) already had told me much about connectivism, but I’m still not sure I got it  – aside from many aspects I totally agree with (connecting with each other, necessity of OER, diversity, learning as „to practice and to reflect“). The slide „Elements of Cooperation“ (starts about 1:24:30) which distinguishes between „collaboration“ and „cooperation“ was impressive and I was reminded of the meaning of words in different languages.
I’ll include the recording of the session in this blog post because there’s much to reflect on.

 

The topic / task of the second week was „Knowing your students“ and „Creating Engaging Activities for them“.
I’ve made a tutorial for a combination of two Moodle activities: choice and forum. The choice activity would be for group selection, the forum activity for discussion on topics provided by the teacher. (I don’t like the technical group functionality of Moodle, because it often confuses teachers and I had cases when wiki content was gone after teachers had played around with the group settings.)
The combination suits many needs, is easy to create as a teacher and easy to use as a student. I’m very interested in basic solutions because I’m often in a situation where I have to convince teachers that using Moodle makes sense and that it works without problems.

That was fast – we are already in week 2 and I still have many things on my to-do-list for week 1.
I really enjoyed today’s live session with Dave Cormier. Starting with his well-known YouTube video „What is a MOOC“ we got into an experiment real soon: About 100 WizIQ web conferencing participants got editing rights on the whiteboard at the same time. I’ve never seen anything like this before. (When I give my AdobeConnect – which is another web conferencing system – courses for teachers and show the whiteboard, there aren’t so many participants by far and I start with simple szenarios.) It was a real impressive demonstration of some key aspects of Dave Cormier’s talk: uncertainty and responsibility. The need to structure a classroom where you can depend on the responsibility of all. Moodle structures things, it provides order but structures are also boundaries.
While Dave Cormier was talking there was extensive use of the whiteboard and not many things had to do something with the talk. At the beginning, when he asked about our thoughts of uncertainty, the responses on the whiteboard still made sense, but that was that (at this time, only some had editing rights). Afterwards, many of us were simply enjoying using the whiteboard and some could not be stopped. I’ll list some of the thoughts that went around in the meeting room about the reasons:

1. „They didn’t know that they changed the whiteboard for all others, and that everyone saw what they were writing.“ (That’s a very valid point, because most often learning environment are structured in a way that students can’t change anything or at least can’t disturb anything.)
2. „They didn’t hear, that they were asked to stop their actions.“ (Also a very valid point because audio in web conferencing systems often is a problem.)
3. „They were happy to use a new tool which they didn’t know yet.“ (A valid point because in my experience it’s natural that many people try to click on everything and drag and draw. And it was actually the first time we were given rights to edit the whiteboard in the Moodle MOOC.)
4. „They didn’t understand because of language problems.“ (Indeed, we are an international group from many places of the world.)
5. „They didn’t see the text chat messages, where many participants asked the whiteboard users to stop.“ (Yes, that could also be a reason, because there really was much activity in the chat window.)

For me, the session wasn’t just a lesson in MOOC activities with great teachers, but also a reminder for aspects a web conference tutor should be prepared for (or if he/she doesn’t like it, should simply avoid by granting the editing rights differently). As I wrote in the text chat „This is a session we will remember“. It would be interesting to do this again with the same participants – I think it would be different.