Uses of "MOOC material" - controversy & comments (NCSU TLTR) prep for TLTG MOOCow planning today 2pm ET tlt.gs/frlv

TODAY May 3, 2013 2pm ET - FridayLive! Online from TLT Group

"Designing Your Courses for Significant Learning vs Covering the Content"

Register FREE  tlt.gs/frlv
Today, Dee Fink will first introduce his approach for improving/developing courses and then guide its use with leaders of TLT Group's new MOOCow  (Massive Open Online Course Or Whatever) that will explore John Sener's book  The Seven Futures of American Education: Improving Learning & Teaching in a Screen-Captured World.  MOOCow will begin May 17

Excerpt from excerpts below:  "Stanford provost John Etchemendy...observed that MOOC material could be used

to enhance quality, to improve efficiency, or in a 'flipped' classroom."

In prep for above, pls review excerpts below from postings of North Carolina State University's TLTR listserv re growing controversy about uses of "MOOC material"  - Steve Gilbert

From Ed Gehringer:

"When I used about 3 weeks of lectures from the Coursera version of UC-Berkeley's Software as a Service course in my own CSC/ECE 517, I didn't think I was making myself redundant.  I just thought I was giving my students the benefit of another perspective.  As it turns out, the course has a companion textbook that covers topics in the order that we need them, rather than skipping around in professional programming books, which is what I used to do.  I could never have developed comparable-quality materials myself in the same amount of time"I did this to turn 517 into a hybrid course.  Half of the time I lectured and had the students perform simple exercises, which were submitted on Google forms and discussed.  The other half of the time, they were given class time to work with their teammates on homework projects.  Once MOOCs are out there, they can be used in several different ways.  At the SIGCSE conference this year, Stanford provost John Etchemendy gave a talk on the future of online education.  He observed that MOOC material could be used

• to enhance quality,

• to improve efficiency, or

• in a "flipped" classroom.

 

From Henry Schaffer:  

 "Why Professors at San Jose State Won't Use a Harvard Professor's MOOC"There is some emphasis put on the interaction between the professor lecturing and the students - when it is a F2F [large] lecture."Can this happen?"I believe so - when I lecture to a large class (100+ students) a) I can sense student uneasiness - by expressions on faces, body language, squirming in the seats, ... and stop, ask if there is a problem/where is the problem? This can't be done without F2F. andb) I ask students to raise a hand if they have a question. My experience with large lectures is that there are enough students who aren't afraid to ask questions, and ...usually the questions asked represent many students.

"On the other hand, the article indicates that perhaps this isn't really a MOOC - as the faculty at SJS can use whatever portions of the MOOC lectures that they wish to use. At that point, this starts to resemble a 'flipped' course."