ID's Blog

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.