Which moocs will scale and maximise the human possibilites of the net generation

[chris macrae]

MASSIVE OPEN ONLINE -COLLABORATION- COURSE -CURRICULUM

Why is MOOC suddenly scaling open education more than anything else in 42 years of experiments and  how do we linkin a collaboration treasure map of 9 minute audio training modules so that www.wholeplanet.tv 2010s can be worlkdwide youth's most productive time

Since 1972 when dad at The Economist and I first observed student experiments with early digital networks, we have been interested in Entrepreneurial Revolution - linking leaders who believe net generation can use collaboration tech to be most productive, heroic and sustainable time for worldwide youth. There are lots of debates over MOOC designs and origins but from our perspective it helps to take a general summary such as the extract from Wikipedia left and add in notes on what designs are scaling to help net generation meet the entrepreneurial revolution goals of the sorts of ER leaders we track at www.wholeplanet.tv

.] . External video  TED talks[19] Shimon Schocken, The self-organizing computer course, October 2012 Daphne Koller, What we're learning from online education, June 2012 Peter Norvig, The 100,000-student classroom February 2012 Salman Khan Let's use video to reinvent education, March 2011 "The New York Times dubbed 2012 'The Year of the MOOC,' and it has since become one of the hottest topics in education. Time magazine said that free MOOCs open the door to the 'Ivy League for the Masses.'”.[20] This has been primarily due to the emergence of several well-financed providers, associated with top universities, including Udacity, Coursera, and edX.[21] In the fall of 2011 Stanford University launched three courses, each of which had an enrollment of about 100,000.[22] The first of those courses, Introduction Into AI, was launched by Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig, with the enrollment quickly reaching approximately 160,000 students. The announcement was followed within weeks by the launch of two more MOOCs, by Andrew Ng and Jennifer Widom. Following the publicity and high enrollment numbers of these courses, Sebastian Thrun launched Udacity and Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng launched Coursera, both for-profit companies. Coursera subsequently announced partnerships with several other universities, including the University of Pennsylvania, Princeton University, Stanford University, and The University of Michigan. Concerned about the commercialization of online education, MIT launched the MITx not-for-profit later in the fall, an effort to develop a free and open online platform. The inaugural course, 6.002x, launched in March 2012. Harvard joined the initiative, renamed edX, that spring, and University of California, Berkeley joined in the summer. The edX initiative now also includes the University of Texas System, Wellesley College and the Georgetown University. In November 2012, the first high school MOOC was launched by the University of Miami Global Academy, UM's online high school. The course became available for high school students preparing for the SAT Subject Test in biology, providing access for students from any high school. About the same time Wedubox, first big MOOC in Spanish, started with the beta course including 1,000 professors.[23] In January 2013, Udacity launched MOOCs-for-credit, in collaboration with San Jose State University. This was followed in May 2013 by the announcement of the first-ever entirely MOOC-based Master's Degree, a collaboration between Udacity, AT&T and the Georgia Institute of Technology, costing $7,000.[31] During its first 13 months of operation (ending March 2013), Coursera offered about 325 courses, with 30% in the sciences, 28% in arts and humanities, 23% in information technology, 13% in business, and 6% in mathematics.[32] Udacity offered 26 courses. Udacity's CS101, with an enrollment of over 300,000 students, is the largest MOOC to date. In Brazil, the startup Veduca launched the first MOOCs in Latin America, in partnership with the University of São Paulo in June 2013. The first two courses were Basic Physics, taught by Professor Vanderlei Salvador Bagnato, and Probability and Statistics, taght by Professors Melvin Cymbalista and André Leme Fleury.[33] In the first two weeks since the launching event, that took place at Polytechnic School of the University of São Paulo in June 12, 2013, more than 10,000 students have enrolled in the courses.[34]   There are few standard practices or definitions in the field yet. A number of other organisations such as Khan Academy, Peer-to-Peer University (P2PU) and Udemy are viewed as being similar to MOOCs, but differ in that they work outside the university system or mainly provide individual lessons that students may take at their own pace, rather than having a massive number of students all working on the same course schedule.[35][36][37] Note, however, that Udacity differs from Coursera and edX in that it does not have a calendar-based schedule (asynchronous); students may start a course at any time. While some MOOCs such as Coursera present lectures online, typical to those of traditional classrooms, others such as Udacity offer interactive lessons with activities, quizzes and exercises interspersed between short videos and talks. Instructional design approaches[edit] External video 10 Steps to Developing an Online Course: Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Duke University[41] Designing, developing and running (Massive) Online Courses by George Siemens, Athabasca University[42] According to Sebastian Thrun's testimony before The President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) on November 26, 2012, MOOC "courses are 'designed to be challenges,' not lectures, and the amount of data generated from these assessments can be evaluated 'massively using machine learning' at work behind the scenes. This approach, he said, dispels 'the medieval set of myths' guiding teacher efficacy and student outcomes, and replaces it with evidence-based, 'modern, data-driven' educational methodologies that may be the instruments responsible for a 'fundamental transformation of education' itself".[20] Because of the massive scale of learners, and the likelihood of a high student-teacher ratio, MOOCs require instructional design that facilitates large-scale feedback and interaction. There are two basic approaches: Crowd-sourced interaction and feedback by leveraging the MOOC network, e.g. for peer-review, group collaboration Automated feedback through objective, online assessments, e.g. quizzes and exams Connectivist MOOCs rely on the former approach; broadcast MOOCs such as those offered by Coursera or Udacity rely more on the latter.[43] Because a MOOC provides a way of connecting distributed instructors and learners across a common topic or field of discourse,[44] some instructional design approaches to MOOCs attempt to maximize the opportunity of connected learners who may or may not know each other already, through their network. This may include emphasizing collaborative development of the MOOC itself, or of learning paths for individual participants. The evolution of MOOCs has also seen innovation in instructional materials. An emerging trend in MOOCs is the use of nontraditional textbooks such as graphic novels to improve students' knowledge retention.[45] Others view the possibility of the videos and other material produced by the MOOC as becoming the modern form of the textbook. "MOOC is the new textbook," according to David Finegold of Rutgers University.[46] Instructional cost of MOOC delivery[edit] In 2013, the Chronicle of Higher Education surveyed 103 professors who had taught MOOCs. "Typically a professor spent over 100 hours on his MOOC before it even started, by recording online lecture videos and doing other preparation," though some instructors' pre-class preparation was "a few dozen hours." The professors then spent 8–10 hours per week on the course, including participation in discussion forums, where they posted once or twice a week.[47] The medians were: 33,000 students enrolled in a class; 2,600 receiving a passing grade; and 1 teaching assistant helping with the class. 74% of the classes used automated grading, and 34% used peer grading. 97% of the instructors used original videos in the course, 75% used open educational resources, and 27% used other resources. 9% of the classes required the purchase of a physical textbook, and 5% required the purchase of an e-book.[47][48] In May 2013 Coursera announced that it would be offering the free use of e-textbooks for some courses in partnership with Chegg, an online textbook-rental company. Students would need to use Chegg's e-reader which limits copying and printing and could only use a textbook while enrolled in the class.[49]   As MOOCs have evolved, there appear to be two distinct types: those that emphasize the connectivist philosophy, and those that resemble more traditional and well-financed courses, such as those offered by Coursera and edX. To distinguish between the two, Stephen Downes proposed the terms "cMOOC" and "xMOOC".[52] Connectivist MOOCs are based on several principles stemming from connectivist pedagogy.[53][54][55][56] The principles include: Aggregation. The whole point of a connectivist MOOC is to provide a starting point for a massive amount of content to be produced in different places online, which is later aggregated as a newsletter or a web page accessible to participants on a regular basis. This is in contrast to traditional courses, where the content is prepared ahead of time. The second principle is remixing, that is, associating materials created within the course with each other and with materials elsewhere. Re-purposing of aggregated and remixed materials to suit the goals of each participant. Feeding forward, sharing of re-purposed ideas and content with other participants and the rest of the world. The term MOOC was coined in 2008 during a course called "Connectivism and Connective Knowledge" that was presented to 25 tuition-paying students in Extended Education at the University of Manitoba in addition to 2,300 other students from the general public who took the online class free of charge. All course content was available through RSS feeds, and learners could participate with their choice of tools: threaded discussions in Moodle, blog posts, Second Life, and synchronous online meetings. The term was coined by Dave Cormier of the University of Prince Edward Island, and Senior Research Fellow Bryan Alexander of the National Institute for Technology in Liberal Education in response to the course designed and led by George Siemens of Athabasca University and Stephen Downes of the National Research Council (Canada).[16 ..

.We are interested in how to scale training to millions of youth that can be used to job create or collaborate around heroic goals which were unimaginable before the internet as the greatest communications revolution ever (1984 book Norman Macrae summarizing 10 year of Entrepreneurial Revolution Dialogue in The Economist). What has happened in 2012 is scale has been reached by 2 opposite types of MOO content - coursera partners typically announce any specific (world best) course as a once a year evente so if you want that course you better sign up simultaneously with large (eg 100000) crowds. A coursera course typically runs 8 weeks with about 60  to 90 minute of content organsied in maximum 9 minute online modules and about 5 hours of associated activities per week including assigmnents, testing, peer group discussion   Khan academy also uses 9 minute training modules but over time as in khan's maths course - these become a definitive always online resource. So while Khan Academy doesn't simultaneoulsy connect large crowds of students to each other - over time it impacts more students. While Khan alumni may need to do more work to find each other, we posit that khan type labs can be networked out of any extraordinary information source youth need to collaborative act on. Ultimately the coursera model of content disappearing 44 weeks in a year is a weakness.   Interestingly because founders of both cousrera an khan academy agree max 9 minute mainly audio training modules are key - there is no reason why best for world content of this sort shouldn't be shared in both types of platform. Please note having said that 9 minute training modules are key- so are other features but which these are does depend on whether you have 100000 simulateanous audience or a 24.7 audience that initially studies content 1 by 1   A lot of the other defintions of origins of mooc in wikpedia are interesting to record but they do not address the issue of now we know a core module needed to scale-   Taking 9 minute modules as core -what other features segment how scaling and types of youth interaction impacts evolve? There are many additional possibiliities to those khan and coursear are currently featuring - eg why not integrate a youth entrepreneur completion into an innovation course; how does the whole world of ebooks and hyperlinking interface mooc? Have we designed features and platform that minimize bandwidth so minimising exclusion of on any online person on planet . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .We would be extremely surprised if a best for world course took less than 100 hours to assemble however we are looking for people who want to do this with the margins of their time and because they are passionate about sharing with youth actions that create jobs etc. This wikipedia extract's implication that a MOOC is costly to produce is biased in the sense that traditional books take far longer than 100 hours but historically few people have claimed that as a reason from not authoring a book . . . . . .. . . .. . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . .. . . We happily accept 2008 as where the acronym MOOC was coined partly because as co-Rheingold Associates we worked virtually with Btian Alexander around 2000 and know him to value the original dynamics of the web intended by Berners Lee,

[chris macrae]

summary of why 9 minute training modules transform scalability and economic reach

 

regarding virtual presentations- both students and teachers have huge difficulty focusing for more than 9 minutes before needing some action learning practice and feedback

 

audio minimises bandwidth, cost of production and prevents execution slip - in ad world it is known that even half a second of video can change the message ; once you have a 9 minute audion that millions of youth need to interact , you can always edit in video versions

 

surveying 9 minute audios that youth can change the world withmakes possibility of anyone being a teacher at least of one module if it proves its actionable worth in youth betworking it -positive viralisaing- many of the 30000 microfanchises that Norman Macrae posited in 1984 would be need to sustain next 3 billion jobs in community (open replication ) ways benfrit from a 9 minute living script

 

conversely if you are assembling a whole interconnected curriculum (eg khans maths) then cataloguing what (max) 9 minute audios you already have helps in mapping how all the pieces come together

 

 once you have a map linking in a curriculum or sub-curriculumof essential 9 minute audios, you can make such world outreach choices as:

what other features will empower millions of students to maximise peer to peer interactions - eg forums, student competitions, online exercises and marking, peer to peer marking of assignments, 

who to partner in maximising win-wins between the future of the training modules impacts for youth (eg job creation, collaboration races to millennium goals) and tutor networks, and top 100 leaders investing in 2010s being youth's most productive decade www.wholeplanet.tv

millennium goal summits in which open education is core and open cataloguing of 9 minute training modules are seen to be a collaboration traeasure map for maximing the post-industrial abundancy economy linked in to valuing how pracftical knowhow mulitplies value in use unlike consuing up things