Over the last 18 months, more-or-less since getting stretchered off a mountain in Norway, I've been leading work funded by the Ufi Charitable Trust to create Citizen Maths which is an open online maths course for adults.
In contrast to many (most?) open online courses the course is at what in England is known as "Level 2", which is the level that 16-year olds are expected to achieve.
The Citizen Maths web site went live on Wednesday, since when people have been signing up on the course, which is built in/on the cloud-based Google Course Builder. If adult education, the learning or teaching of mathematics, or online learning interest you, have a look at Citizen Maths, which tries to put into practice some of the things I've learned about open online courses since doing Peter Norvig and Sebastian Thrun's AI MOOC three years ago.
You may also be interested in some of the supporting material on the Citizen Maths "Information Hub", for example this piece written with Dave Pratt [also this BBC report] about the thinking behind Citizen Maths, or these informal reflections by me and Dick Moore from an excellent 2-day workshop organised in June by Google in Zurich.
As an aside, my involvement in Citizen Maths, and in the creation of another and very different open online course, seem to have interfered with my ability to write Fortnightly (sic) Mailing. I don't fully understand why this is, and it is only partly explained by the "easy-way-out-that-is-Twitter" - see @sebschmoller and, latterly, @citizenmaths.
I think the probable reason is that if you are responsible for building something when the stakes are quite high, and when you are working with partners (true in both projects), it does not feel quite right to be public about how things are going or about what you are learning from the work. Or, perhaps it's the case that the additional care needed in how you frame things, decide what would and what would not be prudent or fair to say etc., makes writing "too complicated".
And the connection with being stretchered off? There is one. But it's complicated.
Citizen Maths - an open online level 2 maths course
Over the last 18 months, more-or-less since getting stretchered off a mountain in Norway, I've been leading work funded by the Ufi Charitable Trust to create Citizen Maths which is an open online maths course for adults.
In contrast to many (most?) open online courses the course is at what in England is known as "Level 2", which is the level that 16-year olds are expected to achieve.
The Citizen Maths web site went live on Wednesday, since when people have been signing up on the course, which is built in/on the cloud-based Google Course Builder. If adult education, the learning or teaching of mathematics, or online learning interest you, have a look at Citizen Maths, which tries to put into practice some of the things I've learned about open online courses since doing Peter Norvig and Sebastian Thrun's AI MOOC three years ago.
You may also be interested in some of the supporting material on the Citizen Maths "Information Hub", for example this piece written with Dave Pratt [also this BBC report] about the thinking behind Citizen Maths, or these informal reflections by me and Dick Moore from an excellent 2-day workshop organised in June by Google in Zurich.
As an aside, my involvement in Citizen Maths, and in the creation of another and very different open online course, seem to have interfered with my ability to write Fortnightly (sic) Mailing. I don't fully understand why this is, and it is only partly explained by the "easy-way-out-that-is-Twitter" - see @sebschmoller and, latterly, @citizenmaths.
I think the probable reason is that if you are responsible for building something when the stakes are quite high, and when you are working with partners (true in both projects), it does not feel quite right to be public about how things are going or about what you are learning from the work. Or, perhaps it's the case that the additional care needed in how you frame things, decide what would and what would not be prudent or fair to say etc., makes writing "too complicated".
And the connection with being stretchered off? There is one. But it's complicated.
Posted on 22/08/2014 in Maths, News and comment | Permalink | Comments (0)
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