Links for two talks at ICTP and one for ETUI about MOOCs

Small edits made 16 February 2014. Small changes made to first presentation 9 October 2013

On 30 September and 1 October I gave two talks during "Science Dissemination and On-line Certification for All" at the International Centre for Theoretical Physics in Trieste. On 20 February 2014 I will do a variant of one of these talks in Brussels at a meeting of the European Trade Union Institute's Pedagocical Committee. Below are some links that are (loosely) relevant to the presentations, two of which are:  An introduction to massive open online courses [0.5 MB PDF]; and What I learned from being a MOOC learner [0.5 MB PDF].

Luis von Ahn - "Duolingo: The Next Chapter in Human Computation: Luis von Ahn at TEDxCMU 2011" - a 17 minute video about the origins of Duolingo in reCaptcha.

ALT - "Lecture capture: doing it well and at scale" - presentations, including by ICTP's Marco Zennaro and Enrique Canessa, from a conference in 2011.

JD Bernal - "Anticipating the Web - information available 'in amplitude in proportion to its degree of relevance'" - extraordinary 1939 foresight.

BIS - "The maturing of the MOOC" [PDF] - a literature review for the Department of Business Innovation and Skills (a UK Government Department).

Carnegie Mellon University - "Principals of Teaching and Learning" - a highly structured web site about learning and learning.

Donald Clark

• "MOOCs: taxonomy of 8 types of MOOC" - 16/4/2013.
• "Report on 6 MOOCs turns up 10 surprises" - 21/5/2013. Parsing Edinburgh University's report on its six Coursera MOOCs.

 

Ian Chowcat - "Ian Chowcat's review of Coursera's Modern and Contemporary American Poetry course" - 17/3/2013.

Coursera - "An Introduction to Mathematical Thinking" - current instance of the course.

"Creative Commons" - the licensing site's "about" page.

Michael Feldstein - "Apollo Group's Technology Investments" - 17/2/2013. Insights into the $1b technology investment of the Apollo Group, which owns the University of Phoenix.

Google - a list of courses people have created using Google Course Builder. See also "We are joining the Open edX platform" and "Mooc.org".

Mark Guzdial - "MOOCs are a fundamental misperception of how teaching works" - 4/1/2013. Has a very energetic discussion thread, from where Peter Norvig's four points in my talk were taken.

Katy Jordan - "MOOC Completion Rates: The Data" - regularly updated. Katy explains: "Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have the potential to enable free university-level education on an enormous scale. A concern often raised about MOOCs is that although thousands enrol for courses, a very small proportion actually complete the course. The release of information about enrolment and completion rates from MOOCs appears to be ad hoc at the moment - that is, official statistics are not published for every course. This data visualisation draws together information about enrolment numbers and completion rates from across online news stories and blogs."

Jaron Lanier - "Does the Digital Classroom Enfeeble the Mind?" - 16/9/2010. A more thought-provoking piece than the trite title might make you expect.

Tharindu Liyanagunawardena, Andrew Adams, and Shirley Williams "MOOCs: A Systematic Study of the Published Literature 2008-2012" - International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning, July 2013

Mara Mayer and Lawrence Cremin - "MOOCs and educational TV - an insight-rich 1989 discussion". See also the link to Mike Caulfield's piece about the discussion.

Eric Mazur - "The scientific approach to teaching" - Keynote speech at the 2012 ALT Conference, 12/9/2013. See also - "An interview in Sheffield with Eric Mazur" - 3/8/2013.

Me

• "Of avalanches, tsunamis and the longer view" - 13/3/2013
• "Unexpected - how an open course's conventional exam can prompt subsequent learning" - 22/12/2011
• "Second report from Keith Devlin's Introduction to Mathematical Thinking course" - 13/6/2013. First report, written in April 2013.

David Matthews - "IMF to offer edX Moocs" - 19/6/2013. The International Monetary Fund has announced it will use the edX massive open online course platform to deliver economics courses to government officials and eventually the public. See also the World Bank's Michael Trucano's 12/4/2013 "MOOCs in Africa".

MIT - "MIT OpenCourseWare after 10 years" - September 2013. An overview of how traffic to the OCW website is continuing to grow, i.e. has not been loosing traction with the growth on interest in MOOCs.

Christopher Newfield - "Corporate open source: intellectual property and the struggle over value" - Sept/Oct 2013. A philosopher discusses the meaning of "shared".

Eli M. Noam - "Electronics and the Dim Future of the University" - 13/10/1995. Includes this: "True teaching and learning are about more than information and its transmission. Education is based on mentoring, internalization, identification, role modeling, guidance, socialization, interaction and group activity."

Peter Norvig and Dylan Wiliam - links to their key note speeches at the 2007 Association for Learning Technology Conference.

OpenUCT Initiative - "MOOC-less in Africa" - 9/9/2013. "Shows the location of the 19 MOOC providers round the world: 8 in the USA, 1 in the UK, 1 in Ireland, 4 in Europe, 2 in Central and South America, 2 in Australia, and 1 in China. And – starkly - none at all in the whole of the African continent."

Chris Parr - "Euro Mooc opens up for business" - 29/4/2013. Describes the "first pan-European MOOC initiative", under which partners from 11 countries, including the UK’s Open University, have signed up to OpenupEd, which currently provides access to around 40 free courses in 12 languages.

P2PU - "The Mechanical MOOC – A Gentle Introduction to Python" - current. An entirely instructorless experimental MOOC.

Rob Rambusch - "Sitting in a bar with a really smart friend. The ai-class: Notes from a Lab Rat" - 20/12/2011. Rob's reflection on being a student on the AI course.

r3dux - "Should you do the Stanford Online A.I. Class?" - October 2011. A dry take on the Thrun/Norvig AI MOOC.

Frederic Skinner - "On teaching machines and programmed learning" - 1954.

"Learning to teach online" - current. The Sheffield College's online course about how to be an online tutor.

Sebastian Thrun - "Computer Vision" - October 2011. An instructional video shot from an odd location.

Udacity - "An Introduction to Artificial Intelligence" - current instance of the AI course.

Veritasium is Derek Muller's engaging YouTube channel about science misconceptions. Worth spending some time with it.

Martin Weller - "FutureLearn & the role of MOOCs" - 23/9/2013. A calm reflection by someone who has been involved in the UK Open University's efforts in online learning for many years. See also Martin Weller and Ley Robinson - "Scaling up an online course to deal with 12,000 students" [PDF]. Education, Communication and Information, 1(3) pp. 307–323, 2001.

Julia Wilkowski - "A Comparison of Five Google Online Courses" - 5/9/2013. Analysis by a Google staff member of course data from ~400,000 learners enrolled on five public Google MOOCs.