Fortnightly Mailing

The chances of edX, Coursera, Udacity et al reaching "Facebook numbers" should not be lightly discounted

I mentioned EPIC 2020, a US-focused Call to Action to compel universities to 'decouple the delivery of content and assessment through a “test out” option' in Snippets from 14 July to 3 August.

Today, via science librarian John Dupuis, I found this interesting critique of / commentary on EPIC 2020, by Justin Marquis.

Though I do not agree with Marquis's assertion that MOOCs currently have a serious and probably inherent flaw in their inability to help people develop their creative and innovative capacities, the piece is worth reading in full.

It is also worth noting the comment on the piece by Bill Sams, originator of EPIC 2020.

"Thank you for the excellent review and discussion of EPIC 2020. My objective in producing EPIC was to create a piece that would cause people to consider and discuss that there are dramatic alternatives to the traditional education system. Given the 25,000 views from 83 countries I am satisfied that I have made a small contribution to what hopefully will become a lively discussion. On a side note as to the timeline: In about seven months Coursera has enrolled one million students. Facebook took ten months to achieve the same level of members. Five years later Facebook is in the neighborhood of one billion members and has a capitalized value of $41 billion. The chances of Coursera and edX reaching similar numbers should not be lightly discounted."

Mark Guzdial's talk with Sebastian Thrun

Mark Guzdial has written this informative and sensibly low-key piece about Thrun's thinking, which benefits greatly from Guzdial having done a lot of prior thinking about teaching and learning computer science.

How has ICT access changed across the world between 2005 and 2010?

Clayton Wright sent me a link to The Little Data Book on ICT 2012 [~250 pages, 1MB PDF], which, he writes, "was jointly developed by the World Bank and the International Telecommunication Union to show progress made in 216 economies (countries) from 2005 to 2010".

The Data Book is worth browsing for the sense it gives of:

• the pace of change;
• the extent of "catch up" that there has been between middle income countries and the rich world;
• the huge income-contingent differences in access to the Internet that persist.

Important for policy-makers: understanding low and discontinued Internet use amongst young people in Britain

On the Periphery? Understanding Low and Discontinued Internet Use Amongst Young People in Britain [PDF, 46 pages] is a new report by Rebecca Eynon and Anne Geniets from the Oxford Internet Institute, funded by the Nominet Trust. Here are the report's conclusions in full:

Online learning - helping learners create learning

Links to Koller and Horowitz talks added 21 August.

At the foot of this post is an 18 minute talk by Peter Norvig at the Google 2012 Faculty Summit on 26 July. In it Norvig reflects on what he learned from developing and running last year's "Stanford" online AI course (in which I participated), making links as he goes with the widely applicable "Theory and Research-based Principles of Learning", from Carnegie Mellon University's Eberly Center for Teaching Excellence.

Two othe things stood out for me from the talk.

The first is the reference Norvig makes to the challenges posed for course design and operation by the "dynamic range" of an online openly enrolled course, by which he means the wider range of capabilities and experience than would be found on a course where there are strict admission requirements.  Norvig is not claiming that this idea is new, but it is good that it is getting attention.

The second is this very striking quote from the polymath Herb Simon:

Learning results from what the student does and thinks and only from what the student does and thinks. The teacher can advance learning only by influencing what the student does to learn.

which squares strongly with something that Dylan Wiliam said at the 2007 ALT conference (where Peter also spoke):

Learning power is a concept that Guy Claxton has put forward. The key concept here—the big trap—is that teachers do not create learning. That’s true—teachers do not create learning, and yet most teachers behave as if they do. Learners create learning. Teachers create the conditions under which learning can take place.

(The full transcript of Dylan's talk is available for download [PDF]. Other talks from the Google 2012 Faculty Summit are also available: Daphne Koller; Bradley Horowitz - hat tip to R Seiter. Horowitz's talk about Google +, for which he is responsible at Google, is particularly interesting.)

Very enlightening study for the BBC about media literacy

Thanks to Nick Shackleton-Jones for publicising the Media Literacy: Understanding Digital Capabilities [archived version of big PDF] about UK citizens' media literacy. There is plenty of meat in it, including clear evidence that upping Internet users' appreciation of and good habits in internet security is a high priority, and striking data about different categories of users' relative willingness to learn. Worth reading in conjunction with the OII's 2011 Internet in Britain report, by William Dutton and Greg Blank [big PDF].

Source

Daphne Koller's London talk “The Online Revolution: Education for Everyone”

I made some small amendments to this post on 14 August.

Here is Daphne Koller's 2 July 2012 University of London talk “The Online Revolution: Education for Everyone”, the focus of which, according to the organisers, was particularly on "the pedagogy/platform that sits behind Coursera".

See also:

1. the comment below from Laura Czerniewicz from Cape Town University on what Daphne Koller says in her talk about South Africa;
2. this link to MOOC pedagogy: the challenges of developing for Coursera.

As an aside, it is a pity that the recording's dovetailing of Daphne speaking with her powerpoint presentation and its video-clips is a bit patchy. As a partial remedy for this, you may find it helpful to have on screen the slides used by Daphne's collaborator Andrew Ng during a similar presentation he made in Toronto around the same time, though these do not contain the video clips.

You have to take your hat off to Diane Ravitch

For the last couple of weeks I've been following Diane Ravitch's blog - A site to discuss better education for all in the US.

Diane is an American educational researcher, historian of education, and public intellectual who has held public office for both Republican and Democratic administrations.  She has a prodigious list of publications to her name, and - born before WW II - she is old enough to have experienced and observed the huge changes in US society - including desegregation - from the mid 1950s onwards.  Diane is using her blog to wage an astonishingly energetic personal campaign - averaging 200 posts per month - to protect public education, and to challenge what Pasi Sahlberg memorably calls the GERM (Global Education Reform Movement)  ideology that asserts that schools will improve if there is competition, standardization, school choice, and test-based accountability. If an average of ~5000 page downloads per day is anything to go by, Ravitch is hitting a chord with her readers.

What makes Ravitch's work all the more interesting is that she is someone who has changed her views.

MOOC pedagogy: the challenges of developing for Coursera

ALT has just published a timely and informative "from-the-sharp-end" article by Jeremy Knox, Sian Bayne, Hamish MacLeod, Jen Ross and Christine Sinclair from Edinburgh University's MSC in E-learning Team about their experiences of and reflections on developing the E-learning and Digital Cultures Coursera course. Related to this from the ALT Open Access Repository, you can access a presentation PDF by Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller of Stanford University and Coursera. "The Online Revolution: Education at Scale" was used by Andrew Ng for his 23 July 2012 Invited Talk "Teaching Machine Learning to 100,000 Students" at the 2012 conference of the American Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. Note that a June 2012 TED talk by Daphne Koller and a July 2012 talk at the University of London cover similar ground.

[Disclosure: I have a minor paid relationship with ALT.]

An interview in Sheffield with Eric Mazur

On 18 July, with help from Graham McElearney, I interviewed Eric Mazur when Eric was in Sheffield. The interview concentrates on: Eric's research into peer-based instruction; large group teaching; closing the gender gap in STEM; and "learning analytics". It ends with some observations for people running institutions. Some of the questions I used were provided by members of ALT.

Here is the transcript of the interview [14 pages, 100 kB PDF]. You can also download the interview as an MP3 file [1 hour, 20 MB MP3]. Eventually both will be published on the ALT web site, with the transcript appearing as an article in ALT News Online.

Eric Mazur will be a keynote speaker at the 2012 ALT conference in Manchester, UK, in September.