CHELT Seminar: Scalable learning: the beautiful paradox of massive open online courses (MOOCs)

Friday April 12 - Scalable learning: the beautiful paradox of massive open online courses (MOOCs)

1:00-2.30 pm 

ANU has become the only Australian member of edX.org, the online learning enterprise founded by Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with the aim of providing free education to one billion people worldwide within 10 years.
In this seminar, we will hear from the two pairs of academics behind the first ANUx courses:  Professor Brian Schmidt and Dr Paul Francis, who will be teaching Astrophysics; and Dr McComas Taylor and Dr Peter Friedlander, teaching a MOOC entitled Engaging India.
We will also hear from Dr Lyndsay Agans, Convenor of the CAP Digital Learning Project, who will discuss some of the organisational thinking and approach behind the development of Engaging India. Lyndsay will open a dialogue on the 'paradox' of distance learning and mass scale as one that actually allows for a more personalised design of education for individual needs, and in particular, the implications of  evolving educational theory of teaching in an open and massive online environment.
Please come and share this thoughtful and critical conversation about the evolving role of technology in higher education and, in turn, the changing place of higher education in the society in which it functions.
Register here   (Venue will be advised to registrants once we have an idea of numbers.)

http://chelt.anu.edu.au/seminars-workshops/chelt-seminars-2013

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Dr Beth Beckmann
Senior Lecturer - Staff Education (Teaching & Learning)
Centre for Higher Education, Learning and Teaching
The Australian National University
T: +61 2 6125 0057    E: elizabeth.beckmann@anu.edu.au
http://cedam.anu.edu.au/people/dr-beth-beckmann
CRICOS Provider No. 00120C
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Developments in online and flexible learning at UBC

Here's a report from Tony Bates on some very interesting developments at UBC, the home of the original Learning Management System (WebCT). It's copied from his blog. Tony Bates has been working in the field of open, distance, and online education for a long time. He is one of the true elders of this academic tribe, and he knows the territory very well. Before he worked at UBC, he played a big role in the growth of the Open University UK. Currently, Tony is a Research Associate with Contact North | Contact Nord, Ontario’s Distance Education & Training Network.

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UBC is going big with online and flexible learning

March 12, 2013 By Tony Bates Leave a Comment

UBC's Vancouver campus

Yesterday (March 11), Stephen Toope, the president of the University of British Columbia, sent an e-mail to all faculty announcing a strategy to increase flexible learning across all the university’s programs. In the e-mail, he announced:

In the latter half of 2012 UBC undertook a strategic assessment of the recent global developments and their meaning for our institution…..which concluded that for UBC to meet the learning expectations of a new generation of students we need to evolve our teaching model further to one that more systematically blends traditional classroom environments with online components, interactive distance dialogues and small support groups.  The key is to provide a flexible approach to suit the varying needs of learners, and so we are calling this the Flexible Learning Initiative.  The primary objective of this effort is to enhance the learning experience of our students.

 We will initially focus our efforts on blending direct entry programs in Arts and Science in Vancouver, but we will also pursue other flexible learning opportunities including additional professional programs, personalized degrees and MOOCs.  Although the intention is to redevelop whole programs, we will work course-by-course, looking for the greatest positive changes for our students and working with faculty most interested in new teaching methods. 

Comment
This is a very significant move by one of the leading publicly-funded research universities in North America. It can be seen that this is a widely focused initiative that goes to the heart of the university’s teaching operations. MOOCs no doubt played some part in the development of the strategy (UBC after all is offering four courses through Coursera) but UBC’s real focus is on making credit programs more accessible and online learning more integrated within these programs.
This is an excellent example of a broad institutional strategy towards online and flexible learning that every university and college needs to now undertake, if they are to stay relevant and competitive in the future. I look forward to seeing how it rolls out at UBC over the next few years.
Declaration of interest
I spent eight years between 1995-2003 working at UBC as Director of Distance Education, and played a very minor part in the ‘strategic assessment’ last year.
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CHELT seminars for March and April

March 14 - Teaching at ANU: new opportunities for professional development and recognition (REPEAT)

More information and registration at http://chelt.anu.edu.au/seminars-workshops/chelt-seminars-2013

March 20 - Habits of Highly Productive Writers

More information and registration at http://researchstudents.anu.edu.au/highlights/index.php

April 12 - Scalable learning: the beautiful paradox of massive open online courses (MOOCs)

More information and registration at http://chelt.anu.edu.au/seminars-workshops/chelt-seminars-2013

Learning from MOOCs

The Web has spawned a plethora of blogs about online learning and teaching, and I monitor only a few of them. (To read them all, or even just the best, would leave me overwhelmed, thin, and sleep-deprived.) Among those I do watch is Stephen Downes' OLDaily. At the moment, he is posting information about MOOCs ... his own opinions, and where to find just about everyone else's.

Now that the MOOC has hit the big time, the flaws are showing, the successes are flowing, and variations to the original model are emerging. We need to know about those, because we can learn from them - not just in case we want to offer a CASS MOOC, but because they help us to understand how to teach in more traditional modes more effectively. By "traditional", I mean not only face-to-face modes of teaching, but also distance modes, online modes, and intensive modes.