16 juin 2013
New Research Effort Aims to Examine Effectiveness of MOOCs
By Sara Grossman. As more and more colleges experiment with massive open online courses, or MOOCs, a new project hopes to cut through the hype and gauge the effectiveness of the courses. The MOOC Research Initiative, financed by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, will award grants of $10,000 to $25,000 to researchers seeking to explore issues such as student experiences in MOOCs and the free courses’ systemic impact. The initiative is aimed at “any group of academics who’ve ‘heard death by MOOCs’ and want to move past the hype and start looking at the actual research around open online courses,” said a co-founder of the project, George Siemens, associate director of the Technology Enhanced Knowledge Research Institute at Athabasca University, in Alberta. Mr. Siemens was one of the first professors to teach a MOOC, in 2008. Read more...A Trinity of Languages
ByGeoffrey Pullum. Banja Luka, Bosnia — Here in the administrative entity known as the Republika Srpska, the Serb-controlled part of the country properly called Bosnia and Herzegovina (Bosna i Hercegovina, abbreviated “BiH” locally), they wave the Serbian flag in preference to the national flag of the country they reluctantly belong to; and the people pretend that their national language is three different languages. The mystery of the three in on. Read more...Rindfleischetikettierungs-überwachungsaufgaben-übertragungsgesetz
By William Germano. Sad news from Germany: the British Telegraph reported this week that the Germans are decommissioning what seems to have been the language’s longest word, the little mouthful that is the title of my post today. The term, which the Telegraph translates as “law delegating beef label monitoring,” apparently arose during the 1990s in response to bovine spongiform encephalopathy. Spawned by a crisis, the R-word may now be the first linguistic fatality attributable to mad cow disease. Read more...Why We Fear MOOCs
By Mary Manjikian. In a 2002 book the anthropologist David D. Gilmore explored our culture’s fascination with monsters. He noted that most monsters are a sort of hybrid. They defy simple explanation because they tend to straddle categories. They might be part human and part animal (like a werewolf) or part living and part dead (like a vampire). The monster is thus a mutated version of something we are already familiar with; it is both familiar and strange. It’s the monster’s amorphous nature that we find upsetting—it blurs categories, so it upsets the natural order of things, causing chaos. I think that’s why we fear MOOCs. As hybrids, they defy easy categorization and threaten to upset the tidy categories we have for judging who is and is not college-educated. Like monsters, MOOCs threaten to disrupt our social world and bring chaos in their wake. Read more...Kleine EU-Staaten machen gegen studentische Mobilität mobil
Österreich will den Zustrom deutscher Studenten zügeln. Belgien klagt über Franzosen. Wie sehr leiden die Universitäten wirklich unter den ausländischen Studenten?"Österreich schmiedet Allianz gegen Deutsche Studenten", titelt Spiegel Online. "Piefke-Alarm", schreibt die Süddeutsche Zeitung. Grund dafür ist eine Äußerung des österreichischen Wissenschaftsministers Karlheinz Töchterle, er wolle einheimische Bewerber an den Universitäten bevorzugen. Der Zustrom deutscher Studenten führe zu einer "Schieflage" an manchen Universitäten. Mehr...
Are remote presence mobile systems the future of reference?
By Brian Mathews. It’s been a little too serious around this blog lately, so here is something fun to stimulate your lateral thinking. A good friend of mine is at InfoComm13—a tradeshow I wish I were attending. This is BEAM. It’s a mobile, WiFi powered, video-conferencing, remote presence system. The features are listed on the website, and it is an interesting concept. Read more...Weekend Reading: the MOOC Catchup Edition
By Adeline Koh. The latest thing that has everyone buzzing in higher education are MOOCs—Massively Open Online Courses. MOOC companies like Coursera, Udacity and Harvard edX courses offer free content to anyone, anywhere, and at any time. MOOCs have been criticized on many counts: for being an ineffective mode of instruction; for their high attrition rates; and their problematic handling assessment. Yet its supporters claim that MOOCs are an important intervention into the skyrocketing rates of college tuition, and champion the ability of MOOCs to offer much-needed instruction to impoverished people around the world. MOOCs have also thus far been limited to elite institutions. Bringing things to a head is San Jose State University’s controversial move to offer college credit for MOOC classes, which has fanned fears of a growing turn by state institutions to use MOOCs instead of regular classes. Its detractors fear that MOOCs will lead to the future unemployment of faculty at non-elite colleges and universities, leaving face to face education to be the privileged preserve of the elite. Read more...Why I’m a Bad Student
By Isaac Sweeney. As I’ve written, I had registered to take a MOOC through Coursera. Turns out, I’m a bad student. First I got behind, then I just stopped doing anything for the class. Much has been written about MOOCs lately, but I just want to lay out a short list of reasons why I did poorly or, more accurately, why I did mostly nothing for an English Composition I MOOC. Read more...Avoiding ‘Cultural Arrogance’ With China
By John Haddad. The following is a guest post by John Haddad, an associate professor of American studies and popular culture at Pennsylvania State University at Harrisburg. He is the author of America’s First Adventure in China: Trade, Treaties, Opium, and Salvation. On a recent trip to China, I made a stop at Sias International University, in Xinzheng, Henan Province, to deliver a lecture on American popular culture. Sias is a relatively new private university that presents itself as an American-style college. Its founder, a local entrepreneur who made his fortune in the United States, believes in internationalism and in cooperation between China and the United States—so much so that he has infused the campus with this vision. Read more...
Moocs sind ein pädagogisches Erlebnis
Die Dozentin Gitta Domik vergibt Credit Points für Onlinekurse – als eine der ersten in Deutschland. Im Interview sagt sie, warum Moocs so manche Vorlesung übertreffen.ZEIT ONLINE: Frau Domik, Sie sind eine der Ersten, vielleicht sogar die erste Professorin in Deutschland, die einen Massive Open Online Course (Mooc) als Semesterleistung anrechnet. Lassen Sie jetzt andere Professoren für sich arbeiten?
Gitta Domik: Nein, natürlich nicht. Doch im vergangenen Semester konnte ich meine Vorlesung Einführung in die Computergrafik selbst nicht halten, weil ich zu einem Forschungssemester in den USA war. Es gibt jedoch drei Studenten, die im kommenden Semester nach Australien gehen und dort diesen Kurs für das Masterstudium erbracht haben müssen. Also habe ich ihnen angeboten, den Onlinekurs Foundations of Computer Graphics des Informatik-Professors Ravi Ramamoorthi von der University of Berkeley zu absolvieren. Mehr...
