A group of UK universities (mine included) have embarked upon a new initiative called “FutureLearn” which seeks to take the raw success of MOOC providers like Udacity, EdX and Coursera (almost exclusively North American) and build them into a diverse and viable teaching framework. This is a really exciting opportunity for the UK universities involved, and I am looking forward to seeing how it turns out. I also have a vested interest, as I am (as of a couple of weeks ago) chairing a Faculty committee on the integration of technology into student learning. However, I have been reading a lot of material about MOOCs that has been less than positive and so I think it is probably worth pointing out some important benefits of MOOCs to help balance the debate:Read More »
Tag: teaching
Open Education III: How to post lectures/talks online
Next post, I will deal with one of the main barriers to the implementation of blended learning: the fear that providing online content will lead to a drop in student lecture attendance or performance. However, the other side of the coin is that the academics who populate our universities simply do not want to have to learn new technologies to use in their teaching. In a bizarre state of affairs, those researchers who are at the forefront of the most technological fields consider themselves incapable of learning a basic piece of software. I’m going to try to make it clear how easy these tools can be to use, so that there are no such excuses! All of these examples will be based around the provision of online lecture recordings.Read More »
Open Education I: Why is open access to education important?
I have blogged before about why I feel that open access to research and educational materials is an important step forward for society. This promotes the learning of those who struggle to access conventional learning modalities (e.g. lower socioeconomic groups who are traditionally excluded from universities) and those who are simply casually interested in learning something new without the need to commit to long-term and expensive courses. The release of data also helps to facilitate the verification of findings in the scientific sphere to avoid the problems associated with scientific publishing.
Carleton University is being too honest on its Wikipedia page
It was recently brought to my attention that there has been some (subversive?) editing on the Carleton University Wikipedia page (click to enlarge):
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Katatrepsis 