Note: I will use this space over the next month to share excerpts from my dissertation The Evolution & Impact of the Massive Open Online Course. The research was a Delphi study bringing together 20 MOOC experts to discuss the MOOC in educational, political, and sociocultural terms (slides from the oral presentation can be seen here).…
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Loading...So I get an email from a member of the district’s IT department about a workshop at the educational technology conference a group of us will be attending together. We are wanting to move towards using My Big Campus as Learning Management System next year.…
(No Ratings Yet)Loading...Research plays an integral part in the archetype of a college professor. At state and select private universities (often known as Research I schools), a professor’s research record is as important as their teaching and service records, often more so. At mid-major and liberal arts colleges, research may not be as integral but it is still important and relevant. …
(No Ratings Yet)Loading...My research and scholarship revolves around how learning technology (specifically recent explosions in distance and online learning technologies such as Khan Academy, cMOOCs and xMOOCs) affects the teaching profession. There is great scholarship on the difficulties of distance instruction, and a whole host of people writing about educational technology while showing concern to stakeholders existing in academics. …
(No Ratings Yet)Loading...In doing some MOOC reading I again got into the comments section to find a difference of opinion, this time on Khan Academy, a content delivery system many xMOOCs herald as inspiration for their wares. I evoked Seymour Papert’s 1991 book The Children’s Machine, specifically his kitchen math discussion, in an attempt to look at why a lecture-based mathematics instruction often doesn’t translate into understanding math for application in life.…
(No Ratings Yet)Loading...I came across a piece from Smithsonian Magazine profiling Sebastian Thrun, the man behind the xMOOC prototype via Stanford’s Intro to AI course (the research community needs a shorthand for this) as well as Udacity. Thrun won the Smithsonian’s American Ingenuity Award for Education based off his work in the MOOC world, and the magazine’s piece about him starts off as most smartly written puff pieces do: a description of the location, the unique idiosynchracies of Thrun as he and the writer meet, a tangential topic that will show its relevance later…boilerplate journalism. …
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Prompted by a recent talk I attended by the brilliant Punya Mishra, I re-watched this 2011 Charlie Rose interview with Sal Khan. It was well worth the price of admission just to hear Punya’s point on the disconnect between the higher order skills Khan employs to create his videos (e.g.,…
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