MOOCsalternative education

Iulian ȘerbănoiuJune 2014 - Brașov Tech Meetup

About me

Iulian Șerbănoiu - Software developer

undergraver

on

MOOC is ...

MassiveOnlineOpenCourse

some MOOC providers

it started in 2012 *

More at: http://edutechnica.com/moocmap/#* 2012- Year of the MOOC[1]

and keeps growing

and keeps growing

and keeps growing

MOOC structure

● Lectures (usually video)● Homeworks● Discussions (forums)● Announcement board

● Wiki (collaborative platform)● Quizzes● Virtual Office Hours● External resources (eg GitHub,

Youtube)● Surveys● Statement of accomplishment● Certifications (not always)

Typical Extra

MOOC structure

Benefits for “students”

● Easy access *

● Your own pace

● In touch with the big world

● Modern way of teaching

● Diversity and various approaches

● Time zones become irrelevant

* even though payment will be needed sometimes

Disadvantages

● Less interactiono virtual office hours/forums may help

● High “dropout” rateo no fear of getting expelledo periodic announcements may help

● Not yet on par with university courseso most people still think with pen & papero new teaching methods needed

● Prerequisites not always defined● Not suitable for all type of courses

Challenges for providers

● Identity verificationo coursera [7]o edX [8]o Udacity [10]

● Making it profitable (*)● Converting MOOCs into college credits,

toward earning degree [11]● Intellectual Property

* Even with donations (like edX and Khan Academy)

Benefits for universities

Lectures used even before MOOCs for publicity:

● MIT (with OCW)● Stanford● Berkeley ● Caltech● ...

New/unique possibilities

Leveraging the power of Internet

First trans institutional course [5]

New/unique possibilities

Leveraging the power of Internet

Automate the automatable

forced to automate because of

“Massive”

● assignment auto-verification

● peer review of homeworks

after deadlineSee [6] for the full list

Course preparation and handling

● A lot of effort for preparing high quality

videos [3]

● Huge effort in managing the MOOC [3]

o support for issues is time consuming

● Many limitations of the MOOC platform[3]

Course experience

● A lot of time required (maybe even 6-10h / week for one course)o watching videos & processing informationo working on assignments

● Platform limitationso automated test platforms don’t always

work well● Your effort may be rewarded

Course experience

● A lot of time required (maybe even 6-10h / week for one course)o watching videos & processing informationo working on assignments

● Platform limitationso automated test platforms don’t always

work well● Your effort may be rewarded

Future?

MOOCs?

Education as a Service (EaaS)? [4]

Only few universities? [13]

“In 50 years [...] there will be only 10 institutions in the world delivering higher education and Udacity has a shot at being one of them. [Sebastian] Thrun just has to plot the right course.”

References[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/04/education/edlife/massive-open-online-courses-are-multiplying-at-a-rapid-pace.html?pagewanted=all&_r=1& [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LSxqpaCCPvY&t=50m45s [3] http://www.dre.vanderbilt.edu/~schmidt/PDF/POSA-MOOC.pdf [4] http://venturebeat.com/2014/05/11/education-as-a-service-5-ways-higher-ed-must-adapt-to-a-changing-market/ [5] http://blog.coursera.org/post/74257050344/a-trans-institution-specialization-on-mobile-cloud [6] http://www.dre.vanderbilt.edu/~schmidt/posa-mooc-countries.txt [7] https://www.coursera.org/signature/guidebook/certificate [8] https://www.edx.org/verified-certificate [9] http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2013/10/2/edx-id-verified-certificates/ [10] https://www.udacity.com/faq#section-0-5 [11] http://www.mooc2degree.com/ [12] http://blog.udacity.com/2014/06/announcing-nanodegrees-new-type-of.html [13] http://www.wired.com/2012/03/ff_aiclass/all/1

Resourceshttp://openclipart.org/detail/19110/virtual-school-cloud-by-jjfbbennetthttp://search.creativecommons.org/http://pambuccian.com/2014/06/01/why-i-designed-the-online-live-learning-and-livetutoring/ http://openclipart.org/detail/172105/user-identity-by-lpr577-172105 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use http://openclipart.org/detail/159643/thank-you-pinned-by-juliobahar http://openclipart.org/detail/177461/mike-the-mic-question-by-bibbleycheese-177461

Alternatives:http://www.wikipedia.org/ http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Main_Pagehttp://www.wikiversity.org/http://ocw.mit.eduhttp://ocw.cs.pub.ro/ http://www.youtube.com/ (university video recordings)