Two teaching experiments with Google Hangous on Air

I teach a class on the applications, implications and technology of the Internet and a major theme running through the course is the use of the Internet as a tool for collaboration. As such, we tried two teaching experiments using Google Hangouts on Air (GHoA).

(GHoA is a free video conferencing application for up to ten people. It differs from other video conferencing services in two ways -- an audience of unlimited size can watch the video conference while it is live and it is automatically recorded and stored on YouTube when it ends).

Student "office hours"

Our first experiment was having students who had done well on the midterm hold "office hours" online using GHoA. I did not participate in any of the sessions, but reviewed the videos afterward.

Students holding "office hours" online

Since I was not "present," the students were generally unguarded and light hearted, talking more freely than in class. Their discussion revealed a couple of content misconceptions, which I corrected the following week.

They also discussed the class itself. One group agreed that it was harder than they had expected and one group felt free to criticize the class. That gave me the opportunity to bring their criticism to the entire class, discuss the point they made and to give the most critical student extra credit for speaking his mind.

They talked about their study habits and how to do well in the class. In doing so, one group came up with the idea of using our weekly quizzes as a “study guide” and answer/discuss questions online. (I don't give them the answers).

They also got to see and hear themselves in an online conference and learned some practical things about microphone adjustment, camera location when using a phone or tablet, microphone positioning, speaker feedback, etc.

The sessions were not mandatory, but I gave those who participated extra credit for convening or attending a session. Many students chose not to participate and I polled them, asking why. Schedule conflicts at the time sessions were convened was the most frequently cited reason.

An online class meeting

The second experiment was to conduct a class session using GHoA instead of in the classroom. (We met at the usual class time, so schedule conflicts were not an issue).

I begin each week with a presentation of misconceptions I saw in their homework assignments and quiz answers from the previous week and current events relevant to our class. Since the goal of the class is to introduce the "skills and concepts needed for success as a student and after graduation as a professional and a citizen," that is followed by presentations focused on a couple of concepts and on a skill, for example, how to use GHoA, an image editor, etc.

I followed the usual in-class format during the GHoA session. The first nine students who "came" to the GHoA session joined the live video conference and those who logged in later joined the viewing "audience."

This was the first time I had run a GHoA class, and it was a learning experience for me. As shown below, I made a number of technical errors. It also felt strange to be presenting material without seeing the audience -- it made me appreciate radio announcers. I suspect one could get used to it.

Mistakes due to my inexperience

I also made the mistake of not preparing the students well enough. They only had one presentation and one assignment with GHoA before we ran our experiments.

After the session, I polled the students on their experience during the live hangout and their use of the recorded video. Here are the poll results for three of the questions on the live hangout:

Selected responses regarding the live class session

And two of the questions about their use of the recorded video after the session:

Selected responses regarding the session recording

As you see, they said they were more comfortable viewing the session at home than in class, their minds were less likely to wander and they generally thought it was as good or better than the classroom as a learning experience. The majority went back and watched at least a portion of the session recording, but there was an inconsistency in their reporting.

The last four questions asked about their overall preference and solicited comments. When asked whether they preferred meeting in class or meeting in a GHoA, 53% preferred the GHoA, 13% the classroom and 33% were indifferent. When I asked them in class what they thought was the best way to offer the course next semester, the consensus was that the first few meetings should be in the classroom and about half of the remaining meetings should be online.

(There were 19 questions in the entire questionnaire and you can see the full poll results (including their comments) here).

This was my first try at using GHoA and I made several mistakes which could be corrected. If others have used GHoA as a collaborative teaching tool, please share your experience.

The Khan Academy -- on the Internet or a LAN near you

The Khan Academy began when hedge fund analyst Sal Khan started posting short, conversational videos on YouTube to help his cousin with her math class. The videos went viral. Today there are 23 courses in math, 7 in science, 4 in economics and finance, 25 in the arts and humanities, 3 in computing and preparation for 8 tests like the SAT along with content from 25 high-profile partners.

The Khan Academy is a non-profit organization that promises to provide a world-class education that is "free for everyone forever," and their open source software is available on GitHub. Over 39 million "learners" have used the material and it is being translated into 40 languages.

As shown below, the courses are comprised of fine-grained modules focused on a single concept and each module includes a test of mastery. The modules are arranged hierarchically, and a student has not completed the course until he or she has mastered a module -- they encourage experimentation and failure, but expect mastery. (Getting a C in a typical college course means the student understood only about half of the material and will do poorly in classes for which the course is a prerequisite -- an effect that compounds throughout college and into the workplace).

Portion of the beginning arithmetic course knowledge graph

In addition to the teaching content, the Khan Academy software presents a "dashboard" that enables a teacher, parent or other "coach" to monitor the progress of a student or class. The red bar shown in the dashboard view below indicates that a student is stuck on a given concept. The teacher can then help him or her or, better yet, have a student who has already mastered the concept tutor the one who is stuck. (Research shows that the tutor will benefit as well as the tutee -- "to teach is to learn twice").

Dashboard with fine-grained progress reports

The dashboard enables a coach to adapt to the strengths and weaknesses of each student and spot learning gaps. They understand that students may be blocked by one simple concept, and sprint ahead once it is mastered. (I recall sitting in freshman calculus class, and being totally lost for half the term, until I figured out what the teacher meant when he said "is a function of" and the class snapped into focus).

Confusion on a single concept "blocked" this student.

The third major component facilitates community discussion among the students taking a given class, allowing for questions, answers, comments and tips & thanks.

Tracking student participation in the course community

But, what if you don't have Internet access?

Learning Equality grew out of a project to port the Khan Academy software to a local area network at the University of California at San Diego. Their version, KA-Lite, can be customized for an individual learner, classroom or school running on a Linux, Mac or Windows PC as small as a $35 Raspberry Pi.

KA-Lite is three years old and has been used in 160 nations by over 2 million learners from above the Arctic Circle to the tip of Chile and translations are under way into 17 languages. The following shows organizations that are deploying it and installations.

There is an interactive version of this map online.

To learn more, visit their Web site and contribute to their Indiegogo campaign.

See this companion post on MIT's Open Courseware, which is also available off line.

For the history, pedagogical philosophy, accomplishments and future of the Khan Academy along with a video collage showing examples of their content, see this 20-minute talk by Sal Khan:

MIT Open Courseware -- on the Internet or a mirror site near you

The grandaddy of online education is 15 years old.

MIT's Open Courseware project (OCW) has been offering free, open courseware under a Creative Commons licence for 15 years. About 2/3 of tenure track faculty at MIT have put material from over 2,300 courses online and they are viewed by over 1.5 million unique visitors per month (monthly statistics here).

There are courses from 31 departments and it is not all engineering and science -- the schools of Management, Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences and Architecture and Planning all have OCW courses.

The format varies from course to course, each offering at least one and perhaps all of the following: video/audio lectures, student work, lecture notes, assessments, online textbooks or interactive simulations.

OCW users are pleased -- 80% rate OCW's impact as extremely positive or positive, 96% of educators say the site has/will help improve courses and 96% of visitors would recommend the site. (My guess is that these figures are dependent upon which course the person had taken since the quality and quantity of material varies from course to course).

The most appealing facet of OCW for me is their Mirror Site Program, which provides copies of their Web site to non-profit educational organizations that have significant challenges to Internet accessibility, inadequate Internet infrastructure, or prohibitive Internet costs.

A mirror site requires a computer with a terabyte of storage that should be accessible by students and faculty from lab or over a local area network or intranet. The courseware is regularly updated, so someone has to be available for a download every week or so and to coordinate with OCW. They recommend an Internet connection of at least 1 mbit/second for updates. The initial install (about 600 gigabytes) is typically from a portable hard drive supplied by MIT.

They currently have 368 registered mirror sites around the world (about 80% in sub-Saharan Africa) and, while most of the material is English, selected courses have been translated into at least ten languages. For example, there are 94 in Spanish.

Most courses are in English, but some have been translated.

Translation is less important for university-level courses than for primary or secondary school since university students can often read and speak English; however, MIT would be happy for others to contribute translations.

Don't forget that the OCW system and course content are under a Creative Commons license, and they encourage people to replicate the material. For example, several copies could be made available in labs run by different departments within a university and at many universities within a nation.

If you are fortunate enough to have Internet connectivity, you can browse the site and course material online. If not, consider setting up a mirror site -- contact Yvonne Ng at MIT. If you do, keep me in the loop and let me know if I can help.

See this companion post on the Khan Academy educational site, which is also available off line.

High school kids are taking more online classes

The UCLA Higher Education Research Institute conducts annual surveys of incoming college freshmen. There are many interesting questions, but since I teach an undergraduate course on Internet literacy, and education applications and services are increasingly important, I focus on two questions in particular:

1. Have you used an online instructional website (e.g., Khan Academy, Coursera) as assigned for a class?
2. Have you used an online instructional website (e.g., Khan Academy, Coursera) to learn something on your own?

The following table shows the percent of incoming freshmen who answered frequently or occasionally:

Three things strike me in looking over these results:

1. Students are not waiting for their schools -- they are taking online classes on their own.
2. Students attending historically black colleges are doing more online study than others.
3. Online classes are growing in popularity among students working on their own and as assigned work.

How would you explain these observations? Do you expect them to continue?
(I also wrote a post after last year's freshman survey).

My grandson took a break from Minecraft to complete
Khan Academy algebra 2 before starting high school. 

Kids are not waiting for schools to go online

My grandson Oscar will enter the 9th grade this fall and he and a friend are working their way through Algebra II at the Khan Academy this summer. No one told them to do it -- no one assigned it – they just decided to do it on their own.

It turns out that Oscar and his friend may not be all that unusual. UCLA conducts an annual survey of incoming first-time, full-time college freshman and they included two questions about student's experience with online classes in the 2013 survey:

• Have you used an online instructional website (e.g.,Khan Academy, Coursera) as assigned for a class?
• Have you used an online instructional website (e.g., Khan Academy, Coursera) to learn something on your own?

The following table shows the percents of students who answered frequently or occasionally:

Overall, more than 40 percent of the incoming freshmen were frequently or occasionally assigned to use an online instructional website during the past year and nearly 70 percent had used online sites on their own.

Digging a bit deeper, we see that students entering public schools were a little more likely to have online experience than those entering private schools. (Public colleges and universities also offer more online instruction). To me, the most interesting finding was that students entering historically black colleges and universities are much more likely to have online education experience -- on their own or assigned -- than the typical incoming freshman. I could speculate on the cause of this discrepancy, but it really requires further research.

College expectations correlate with high school experience -- students who are going to historically black and, to a lesser extent, public schools are more likely to expect to take online classes in college:

The survey also yields some insight into the importance of having used online classes. They correlate online participation with a multi-dimensional positive habits of mind index and conclude that

Students who chose to independently use online instructional websites are also more likely to exhibit behaviors and traits associated with academic success and lifelong learning.

My grandson Oscar and his friend may be ahead of the curve, having been assigned Khan Academy lessons while in junior high, but it looks like today's kids know the Web is good for school work as well as playing games, posting selfies and building Minecraft worlds.

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Update 9/1/2016

The latest UCLA survey of incoming first-time freshmen is out. The following table shows the percentages of students who used an online education site during the previous year -- either on their own or for a class assignment:

Click to enlarge

Here are three observations:

• Students were more likely to take an online class on their own than as part of an assignment.
• Freshmen at historically black schools were more likely to have taken an online class than others.
• Online study increased more rapidly between 2014 and 2015 than during the previous year.

This table shows the averages for all schools combined -- it clearly shows the increased use of online material.

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Update 9/9/2016

The survey focuses on students taking classes from online sites like Coursera and the Khan Academy. If you are unfamiliar with them, check out this interview of Coursera co-founder Daphne Koller and this interview of Khan Academy founder Sal Khan. The interviews are from the Chronicle of Higher Education re:Learning podcast, which is part of their re:Learning Project.

I also forgot to add a link to my post on last year's (2015) survey -- it's here.

.

Outline of a system for asking, answering and discussing student and teacher questions

I give my students weekly quizzes to focus their studying on key skills and concepts and to encourage them to keep up with the class. The quizzes typically have 7-9 questions and a typical answer is a couple of words or sentences.

After they take a quiz, I post it online so, by the end of the term, they have all the questions. I refuse to give the students answers (that drives some of them nuts), but am willing to discuss the questions and encourage them to discuss them among themselves. (I curve grades relative to the top person in the class, so helping another student does not hurt one's grade).

Each semester, an enterprising student sets up a forum for collectively answering the questions -- perhaps on a blog with a post and comments for each question or, more likely, as a shared Google doc.

I like that because it provides an example of a student assuming leadership and illustrates the use of the Internet to facilitate collaboration, but I very much dislike the focus it puts on memorizing the "right" answer rather than discussion and explanation and, more important, raising new questions.

A blog or shared document with comments or a vanilla threaded discussion, allows for questions and discussion, but the students take the easy way out and pretty much focus on a single answer, period. (I find that the first answer someone posts is usually accepted without question or discussion, even if it is incorrect).

So, I would like a collaborative system that encouraged discussion and questioning. What might that look like?

I would seed the discussions with the sorts of weekly quiz questions I currently give and students could respond by suggesting an answer or asking a related question. A simple answer would not suffice -- it would have to be supported by a brief explanation and/or a link to its source. The system would present the student with a simple answer submission form (with all fields required):

There would also be a mechanism for the other students to evaluate the answer and its explanation. A simple mechanism like a "Thumbs Up" button would encourage voting, but is somewhat superficial and easily gamed (though one might detect that through statistical analysis -- or at least tell the students you could :-). More elaborate systems in which students have to fill out a simple form in order to vote for an answer would also be possible. That would discourage thoughtless voting and also provide more fine-grained data for determining the value of an answer, but would discourage voting.

The system should allow the teacher to customize the answer-evaluation mechanism and to allow or disallow anonymous contributions.

More important than answering questions, students should have a mechanism for posing questions. (Our education system focuses on getting correct answers to questions, but raising questions and seeking satisfactory answers is a more valuable skill -- life is not a series of multiple choice exams).

The same answer-submission form would be used for a question asked by a student as one asked by the teacher.

In addition, there should be a means of evaluating a question -- again, ranging from a simple "Thumbs Up" to a short form.

In addition to student evaluation of answers and questions, the system should be instrumented to give the teacher feedback on what is working and what is not and for (optional) use in grading. (Like it or not, grades are the primary motivation for most students). The teacher should also have the option of sharing those statistics with the students or keeping them hidden.

Well, that is a rough sketch of the question discussion and answering system I would like to have. The closest thing I have seen is Stack Overflow, where users post technical programming questions, answers are voted up or down and a contributor's reputation is a function of the ratings of his or her answers over time -- perhaps that could be a starting point for implementing what I've outlined here. In the meantime, I plan to take a look at QSQA, an open source question answering system that I may be able to use for my class. Has anyone reading this post used it?

MOOC competition is heating up -- two European MOOC providers are going live

I discussed the global nature of online education in an earlier post. While MOOCs started in the US, and US companies and universities have offered the majority of classes to date, online education will be a global market for providers as well as students.

Two European MOOC providers, iversity and Futurelearn, are going live this month. The first course offered by Futurelearn, a coalition of UK universities, starts October 21. It is an ecology course called "Fairness and nature: When worlds collide" and it will only last two weeks. I will enroll to get a look at the Futurelearn delivery platform.

Iversity began with a scholarship from the German Federal Ministry of Science and Technology and is now venture funded. They will be offering MOOCs by university professors from around the world and are launching with six courses this month. Their course promotion videos are innovative, for example, combining video and graphics and using 3D video, as shown below. I want to keep an eye on their platform as well.

Are poor students excluded from online education?

Can peer-peer support compensate for disadvantages?

Corey Davis, director of online learning at Our Lady of the Lake University, was interviewed recently on the Chronicle of Higher Education's Tech Therapy podcast. Davis says the discussion of MOOCs and other online courses often fails to consider minority (poor) students and the obstacles they face.

Davis addresses two general issues -- lack of access to technology and poor preparation in terms of both technical proficiency and conception of education.

He has addressed the technology access problem by developing an online course for Latino oil workers, who only have access to mobile phones, not computers with broadband connections. Presumably those workers also have poor computer/Internet skills and do not have an academically-oriented background.

The problems he addresses are very real, and his effort valuable, but there are a couple of problems with the mobile, low tech approach.

Let's imagine the same course, developed twice -- once for delivery on a broadband-connected computer and once for delivery on a 4G cell phone. Which will be the most frustrating and confusing? Taking the course using the computer will be simpler, faster and less frustrating than using the phone. If we restrict this to a 3G phone, the gap will be wider and if we restrict it to a 2G phone (most common among poor people world wide) it will be impossible to deliver the same course.

The people Davis wishes to support need and deserve the broadband/computer version.

The second problem has to do with attitudes toward and expectations about education. Someone raised in a family that values education and has learned to learn effectively has an advantage regardless of technology access or skill.

One solution to this problem would be monitoring and mentoring students who are doing poorly, but that is expensive and does not scale to MOOC proportions. Might a course on how to take a course help?

Explicit support of student peer groups might also be helpful -- formally tying the success of each group member to the performance of the group as a whole. The efficacy of peer tutoring is well documented. (This is reminiscent of both executive bonuses on Wall Street and the five-member groups of Bangladeshi village women who receive Grameen micro-loans -- quite a range).

I don't have a lot of solutions, but, as Davis says, these are important problems. If they are not addressed, online education may be part of the inequality problem, not part of the solution.

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Update 5/29/2013

I just finished this post saying we would be short-changing poor students if we only gave them material on cell phones, but, I do a lot of work in developing nations and there are things we can do now -- even with 2G phones.

FrontLineSMS has an SMS server that has been used for many applications in developing nations.  I just learned that they have an education-oriented version in beta.  Check it out.

I've got to throw in a photo that I show my classes -- motivated students studying under street lamps because they have no electricity at home:

Report on public, online education in California

The Twenty Million Minds Foundation has published a report on using online education to address bottleneck courses in California.

They survey the current efforts (California Virtual Campus, Cal State Online and UC
Online), outline approaches for the future and and offer a number of recommendations, including:

1. Making sure students have access to support services and academic mentoring, akin to what many institutions already offer within their own classrooms, but extended outside the parameters of the campus, when their students, for example, sign up for third-party offerings

(Important because "Online education classes typically require more self discipline, better reading skills, and better awareness of when to seek help than traditional classes do" -- for example see http://bit.ly/URnHKA).

2. Encouraging faculty to experiment with the integration of technology into their instructional practices

(Important because we are at the start of an expansion of online services that will enable faculty to develop novel online material -- for example, see http://bit.ly/121z9rU).

Is there a place for online training companies in the MOOC discussion?

My daughter teaches an upper division finance course, in which spreadsheets are an important tool. In order to take her class, the students must have passed two classes -- an introductory information systems course, which includes learning to use Excel, and a prerequisite finance class.

She tells me that a number of her students do not understand that you can enter a formula into a spreadsheet cell. Others may understand that they can enter formulas, but lack basic arithmetic skills like understanding percents and rates or converting from one unit of measure to another.

It turns out that they do gain rudimentary skill with Word and PowerPoint in the introductory course (or before they get to college), but we are doing a bad job of teaching rudimentary spreadsheet skills.

What can we do? One approach is to put off the introduction to spreadsheets until they are needed in an accounting or finance class, and present them there, but that would lead to curricular redundancy.

How about a short course on spreadsheets that focused on just the features needed for subsequent classes? That sounds like a good idea to me, but it is less than a typical college course -- perhaps one unit. That would be administratively awkward and, more important, we do not seem to be capable of teaching spreadsheet skills to a significant number of our students.

How about a spreadsheet MOOC? That would pay off in terms of economy of scale, and we should be able to spend the resources on it to become really good spreadsheet teachers. We could even make the course modular so a given school could elect just the spreadsheet features they wanted their students to master.

Cool, let's do a MOOC, but who should teach it? Today's MOOCs are offered by university professors, but would it make more sense to turn to an organization with expertise in training?

I Googled around and found two organizations with Excel training online, Udemy and Lynda.com. Would they be better candidates for teaching a spreadsheet MOOC than a university? Would they be willing to sell wholesale to a university -- giving us reduced prices for, say, 100 students and tailoring the course to the features we want covered?

Udemey charges $99 for unlimited lifetime access to their 16-section Excel course. What would they charge for, say, 100 students who had access to only 8 of the sections for one semester?

Lynda.com charges $25 per month for access to all of their training material. What would they charge for, say, 100 students who only had access to their Excel course for three months?

Universities around the world are beginning to offer MOOCs and we are thinking about giving credit for completion of MOOCs offered at other universities. Perhaps we should also think about giving credit for or requiring completion of courses taught by training companies.

Columbia University study slams traditional online classes -- we need to move beyond traditional

Researchers at Columbia University’s Community College Research Center have released a working paper "Adaptability to Online Learning: Differences Across Types of Students and Academic Subject Areas", based on a study of nearly 500,000 courses taken by over 40,000 community and technical college students in Washington State. The study was based on traditional online courses, which typically have about 25 students and are run by professors who often have little interaction with students. (I will return to this point below).

Here's the bottom line -- the study concluded that “the online format had a significantly negative relationship with both course persistence and course grade, indicating that the typical student had difficulty adapting to online courses.”

This is consistent with the anecdotal reports of my colleagues who teach online -- they have much better experience with masters level classes than undergraduate.

Let's drill down a bit.

The study found that the negative results for online classes held across the board, but the effect was stronger for some subgroups – “males, Black students, and students with lower levels of academic preparation experienced significantly stronger negative coefficients for online learning compared with their counterparts, in terms of both course persistence and course grade.”

They also note that "performance gaps between key demographic groups already observed in face-to-face classrooms (e.g., gaps between male and female students, and gaps between White and ethnic minority students) are exacerbated in online courses."

They found that older students adapted more readily to online courses than did younger students. (Again, consistent with my colleagues' observations).

The study also found that "the relative effects of online learning varied across academic subject areas ... two academic subject areas appeared intrinsically more difficult for students in the online context: the social sciences (which include anthropology, philosophy, and psychology) and the applied professions (which include business, law, and nursing)."

The authors of the study went on to suggest policies to cope with the problems they identified:

• Screening: Only allow certain students to take online classes, for example those with a 3.0 or better GPA or those who successfully complete a workshop on online learning skills.
• Scaffolding: Incorporate the teaching of online learning skills into online courses in which less-adaptable students tend to cluster.
• Early warning: Identify and intervene with students who are having difficulty adapting.
• Wholesale improvement: Improving the quality of all online courses taught.

The first three feel like fingers in the dike to me, but how about wholesale improvement? At the start of this post, I noted that these were traditional online courses. They are often quick makeovers of classroom courses -- using standard textbooks and ancillary materials, but substituting threaded discussion for classroom sessions. Old wine in new bottles.

This is understandable when there are, say, 25 students in a class. There is no time for "wholesale improvement."
However, if we scale the online class up, say enrolling 500 active, for credit students, we can afford to create "new wine."

We see experimentation along these lines in MOOCs -- highly modular, interactive presentations created specifically for online delivery, peer interaction, instrumentation of material, crowd-sourced feedback from students, high production values, frequent revision of teaching material, etc.

None of this is affordable if we are teaching sections of 25 students, but for 500 students, we can afford full time staff producing and maintaining a single course. Hey, with 20,000 students we can afford Disney Studios.

UC online: $4.3 million marketing campaign, one sale

UC Online prices -- click to view

The University of California had a grant and large loan to start UC Online, but the San Francisco Chronicle reported that they have only sold one course to a student outside the outside the university -- to a high school girl who paid $1,400 for an online pre-calculus course at UC Irvine and four units of UC credit.

For more on the financing, see this VentureBeat post.

It seems you can give courses away or sell degrees, but individual classes are hard to sell.

Inverting classes and outsourcing teaching material

Last week, I sent my class a copy of the announcement of Stanford's forthcoming MOOC An Introduction to Computer Networks.

One of the better students replied immediately, thanking me and saying it was just what he had been looking for. Since our on-campus introduction to networking involves some lab work, the two classes will not be identical, but could they be complementary?

This morning I read that NYU will run an inverted class in programming. The students will work through online teaching material at Codeacademy.com, then come to class to address problems and ask questions. The weekly class will also have guest lectures from technology industry leaders.

I find myself running an increasingly inverted class, expecting students to study my online modules on their own, freeing up class time for questions over the material and feedback based on their weekly assignments and quizzes. We also discuss current events that are pertinent to the class, which I describe in blog posts and Google Plus posts during the week.

Are you using any "outsourced" teaching material? Inverting your classes?

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San Jose State has reported improved test scores in a pilot comparison of an inverted class section using MIT material. It was just a midterm result from one section, so is far from conclusive, but we will keep an eye on the project and hope others do similar comparisons.

#digilit #jiscdiglit #highered #edreform #MOOC #pedagogy #EDUCAUSE #bonkopen
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The structure of Google's Internet search MOOC

Google has posted the content of their Internet search MOOC. It consists of six 50-minute classes, and I went through the first one, to see how Google is approaching MOOCs.

The class consisted of an introductory video followed by five lessons with activities for each lesson.

Four of the lessons were videos showing screenshots and screencasts with a talking head in a small window, as shown below. The fifth lesson was a professionally produced video on how search engines work.

Each activity started with a boxed text summary of the points made in the associated lesson, as shown here.

The summary was followed by three or four activities. There were three types of activity:

• Multiple choice/true false questions, followed by the answers
• An admonition to think about something or answer an open ended question before proceeding (for example "What is something you have wanted to find that color filtering might have helped you locate faster? Reflect on this before proceeding to the next lesson.")
• An open ended question, followed by the response of an "expert" to the same question

#mooc #digitalliteracy #edreform #highered #bonkopen #pedagogy #edtec

Students in MOOCs form groups to study and socialize

Students in online courses are forming groups, both online and in the real world, to study and socialize. They discuss the content of the courses and the MOOC process and its impact on higher education. The groups may remain active after the course ends.

Some examples I found in an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education are:

• Using Meetup.com to form local face-to-face (FTF) groups
• Weekly Google Hangouts with the professor and interested students (John Boyer also uses weekly online office hours to supplement his massive on-campus class)
• FTF “office hours” in different cities
• Student organized groups on Google Plus
• CompScisters, a Facebook group to encourage women to take and complete MOOC’s in mathematics and science

What is a MOOC?

MOOCs (massive, open, online classes) are a hot topic -- they've generated a lot of experimentation, press, venture capital, etc. When my colleagues ask what it is all about, I point them to these quick resources:

1. Peter Norvig, The 100,000-student classroom. This is a six-minute TED talk describing the MOOC Norvig and a colleague taught at Stanford along with some of the principles that guided the course design.

2. A twenty minute audio interview of George Siemens, a professor at Athabasca University. Siemens was one of the first to teach a MOOC. (He may have coined the term). He describes his decentralized approach to MOOC design and, like Norvig, focuses on the need and opportunity for pedagogical research.

3. A twenty minute Ted Talk by Coursera co-founder Daphne Koller presents their MOOC techniques and highlights a few pedagoical research results.

4. Two blog posts that give a sense of the video production process at Udacity, a prominent, venture funded startup:

• Katy Reichelt, video editing manager at Udacity: Video editing and the learning process
• John Regehr, Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Utah describes the Udacity production process from the point of view of a teacher.

Disclaimer -- these are all presentations by enthusiasts. I've written several posts on MOOCs in the last year or so, and see a lot of potential, but there remain many unanswered questions.

Google to offer a MOOC with certification

Google will offer a MOOC on becoming a power searcher starting in July. The course will consist of six 50-minute classes with interactive activities.

The topic may sound mundane and self-serving, but there are two interesting aspects that make this course worth watching.

Students will use Google Plus, Groups and Hangouts to form learning communities and help each other out. These assets might give Google a strategic advantage in online education, and it will be interesitng to see how students and the course faculty end up using them.

It will also be interesting to see how the certificates of completion are used by others. For example, an undergraduate might be required to complete this MOOC as part of a digital literacy course or as a pre-requisite for a more advanced course.

I'm curious enough to sign up and see for myself.

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The course is now complete and you can take it at your leisure. The six 50-minute classes are at:
http://www.powersearchingwithgoogle.com/course

Can we use automated test essay graders as writing tutors?

Massive online classes are a hot topic -- they may disrupt and democratize education. Large classes offer economies of scale in the cost of developing and delivering teaching material, but grading does not scale as well. Multiple choice questions and simple computer algorithms can be graded automatically, but grading essays and other forms of assessment is labor intensive.

Might we automate essay scoring?

Kaggle is a company that organizes contests where teams of data analysts -- data miners -- are given a training data set, which they use to develop a predictive algorithm. In a recent contest, teams were given 16,000 student essays that had been graded by humans. The essays were responses to questions on state standardized tests. The contestants used this data to develop scoring algorithms that were then used on another set of test essays.

Randall Stross, writing in the New York Times, says the winning predictive algorithms were "eerily accurate" compared to human graders.

This $100,000 contest was sponsored by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, and is part of a broader program on automated grading. They recently published an analysis of the efficacy of commercial essay grading programs and a Kaggle blog post says they will run a second contest for grading of short-answer questions this summer. Three additional automated grading studies are in development.

Whether they are graded by humans spending a couple of minutes each or computers, the short-essay questions on standardized tests are not terrific indicators of writing ability.

Giving students feedback on rough drafts as they write would be a better application of this sort of technology. Writing online is increasingly important, and I have developed teaching modules on several types of writing, including short documents like these essays. I urge students to use spelling and grammar checkers, but that is rather shallow. Could short-essay grading algorithms be turned on their heads to give students feedback on the quality of their drafts while they are writing?

Global online education is taking off

Education cost and consumer prices

As shown here, the cost of education (in the US) is rising faster than general inflation. At the same time, voters are cutting spending on public education. As a result, online schools are springing up all over. There are many variations on the theme, and it will be fascinating to see which models survive. Here are some examples:

• Calstate online: Charge tuition and grant degrees. Self-sustaining, non-profit.
• edX: Free for now, but will they one day offer certificates for a fee? Large cash endowment, but what happens when that runs out?
• The Khan Academy: Free forever? Contract with school districts? Foundation support.
• Udacity and Coursera: Venture backed university spin offs are free for now, but investors will want income in the future.
• NPTEL, the National Program on Technology Enhanced Learning: Produced by the Indian Institutes of Technology. Government funded and free.
• Open University: Grants degrees and charges tuition (discount for UK students).
• Open University Learning Space: Free online courses from 1-20 hours long from the Open University and the BBC.

Venture capital comes to education

There are also students with different goals:

• Young people seeking a degree or certification at the beginning of their careers
• Working people seeking a degree or certificate in order to improve their positions
• Working people seeking training in a specific job skill
• Curious people who want to learn about a subject as an end in itself
• Curious people who want to acquire a skill as an end in itself

To make matters even more interesting, while US entries in the online education have been getting a lot of attention, this is a global phenomenon. We see offerings from the US, UK, India, Namibia and many other nations. Needless to say, there are also online students in every nation.

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Update 4/10/2013

UK Universities Minister David Willetts urged university leaders to invest in the "historic opportunity" presented by global online education.  The BBC article covering his talk also summarizes current online education efforts in the UK and places them in a global context.

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Update 4/25/2013

Coursera has launched its first international course, Science, Technology, and Society in China I: Basic Concepts, from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.

According to an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, 17,000 students registered for the three-week course -- around 60 percent of them from the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, and other rich nations, with the rest from countries like Brazil, Mexico, South Africa, and middle-income countries in Asia.  The article continues with an interesting discussion of the opportunity and barriers presented by the Chinese market for online education.  Will it be open or dominated by Chinese companies and universities?  Will Chinese universities and faculty be allowed to use Coursera and other platforms or will China erect a "walled campus?"  This course is in English -- will Coursera offer classes in Mandarin?

Other posts on MOOC globalization.

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Update 7/8/2013

The Chronicle of Higher Education profiles five international MOOC providers:

• Schoo (Japan)
  
• Open2Study (Australia)
  
• Veduca (Brazil)
  
• FutureLearn (Britain)
  
• iversity (Germany)

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Update 10/3/2013

Futurelearn, a coalition of universities in the United Kingdom, announced their first round of courses recently and now Udacity, with support from Google, has announced an effort to translate their existing courses. You can see an example here, with closed captions available in a variety of languages. Will English with sub-titles be sufficient or will students prefer native language presentation?

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Update 10/12/1013

list of MOOC providers They say it is up to date as of September 27 th.

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Update 10/16/2013

Two European MOOC providers, iversity and Futurelearn, are launching this month. The first course offered by Futurelearn, a coalition of UK universities, starts October 21. It is an ecology course called "Fairness and nature: When worlds collide" and it will only last two weeks. I will enroll to get a look at the Futurelearn delivery platform.
Iversity began with a scholarship from the German Federal Ministry of Science and Technology and is now venture funded. They will be offering MOOCs by university professors from around the world and are launching with six courses this month. Their course promotion videos are innovative, for example, combining video and graphics and using 3D video, as shown below. I want to keep an eye on their platform as well.

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Update 11/4/2013

Global competition is heating up. Coursera is establishing "learning hubs" around the world and has found a Chinese parnter, NetEase.

Coursera learning hubs

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Update 1/17/2014


Two thirds of all MOOC users live abroad in countries like Rwanda, Kenya, China, and Brazil according to this post by David Blake.

His post includes links to these MOOC providers:

ALISON (Ireland), Ewant (China), FutureLearn (United Kingdom), iVersity (Germany), Open2Study (Australia), Rwaq (Saudi Arabia), Schoo (Japan), UniMOOC (Spain), Veduca (Brazil), and XuetangX (China).

Is college's stone age is about to end?

Mark C. Taylor, chairman of the department of religion at Columbia University, asks whether college's stone age is about to end in a three part article on the university in the Internet era.

The three parts are at:

• How competition is killing higher education
• Is college's stone age about to end?
• College crackup and the online future

Here are a few quotes and paraphrases:

• We produce too many unemployable PhDs.
• Is one paying for education or certification when attending college?
• Some subjects can be outsourced; for example, let one college have a strong French department and another a strong German department.
• Online education will be modular.
• There will be online winners and losers.
• Financial pressure and improved technology have reached the point where much education will soon go online.
• The networking of higher education will transform how teachers teach and what students learn.
• Disciplines will need to be reconfigured -- departments can be transformed or abolished.
• Faculty will increasingly serve as academic counselors who advise students on designing classes and integrating programs at different institutions.
• Excessive competition and overspecialization are the plagues of higher education.