User:Jasonm/mooc

The Ideals and Reality of Participating in a MOOC Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Networked Learning 2010

"The research found that autonomy, diversity, openness and connectedness/interactivity are indeed characteristics of a MOOC, but that they present paradoxes which are difficult to resolve in an online course. The more autonomous, diverse and open the course, and the more connected the learners, the more the potential for their learning to be limited by the lack of structure, support and moderation normally associated with an online course, and the more they seek to engage in traditional groups as opposed to an open network."

The potential of peer-to-peer learning: taming a MOOC with social media

"ELearning and Digital Cultures, from the University of Edinburgh, was offered on the Coursera platform in January 2013. Over 40,000 enrolled, from every continent. The course was aimed mainly at educators wanting to “deepen their understanding of what it means to teach and learn in the digital age”. As participants, we experienced deep and significant learning, very much through social media. The peer-to-peer learning we engaged in and benefitted from was not traditionally organised ‘group work’ or micro-managed interaction, but something more fluid, open, student-initiated and led, that seems to have gone to the very core of what online learner agency, and digital culture, is all about."

Pedagogy of Abundance or a Pedagogy to Support Human Beings? Participant Support on Massive Open Online Courses

"This paper examines how emergent technologies could influence the design of learning environments. It will pay particular attention to the roles of educators and learners in creating networked learning experiences on massive open online courses (MOOCs). The research shows that it is possible to move from a pedagogy of abundance to a pedagogy that supports human beings in their learning through the active creation of resources and learning places by both learners and course facilitators."

Implementing a massive open online course (MOOC)

"Even so, we set out in Fall 2012 to tackle each of those challenges and more. We present in this tutorial how to implement (and how not to implement) a MOOC, based on lessons learned while designing and implementing CS50x: Harvard University's Introduction to Computer Science I, edX's largest fall course with 120,000 registered students. We present what we did, how we did it, why we did it, and what we would and wouldn't do again so that others might build upon our own experience."

The pedagogical foundations of massive open online courses First Monday, May 2013

"Although not specifically designed to optimise learning, claims have been made that MOOCs are based on sound pedagogical foundations that are at the very least comparable with courses offered by universities in face–to–face mode. To validate this, we examined the literature for empirical evidence substantiating such claims. Although empirical evidence directly related to MOOCs was difficult to find, the evidence suggests that there is no reason to believe that MOOCs are any less effective a learning experience than their face–to–face counterparts. Indeed, in some aspects, they may actually improve learning outcomes."

MOOCs and the funnel of participation Third Conference on Learning Analytics and Knowledge (LAK 2013), 8-12 April 2013

"This paper explores these issues, and introduces the metaphor of a funnel of participation’ to reconceptualise the steep drop-off in activity, and the pattern of steeply unequal participation, which appear to be characteristic of MOOCs and similar learning environments."

Studying Learning in the Worldwide Classroom Research into edX’s First MOOC RPA Journal Summer 2013

"This article describes both the first stage of this research, which examined the students’ use of resources by time spent on each, and a second stage that is producing an in-depth picture of who the 6.002x students were, how their own background and capabilities related to their achievement and persistence, and how their interactions with 6.002x’s curricular and pedagogical components contributed to their level of success in the course."

Fair and Equitable Measurement of Student Learning in MOOCs: An Introduction to Item Response Theory, Scale Linking, and Score Equating RPA Journal Summer 2013

"In this paper, we describe a framework for maintaining test security and preventing one form of cheating in online assessments. We also introduce readers to item response theory, scale linking, and score equating to demonstrate the way these methods can produce fair and equitable test scores."