It’s February, already?! This year, I’m excited to spend some time collaborating with a group of open education colleagues, as part of a BCcampus Open Education Advocacy and Research Fellowship. The rest of the team consists of Jennifer Barker, Ken Jeffery, and Rajiv Jhangiani. Good company!
The aims of the fellowship are to raise awareness of open educational practices and to conduct, present, and publish research on open educational practices at BC institutions. You can read more about what each of us is hoping to achieve in this announcement.
And since this fellowship is related to advocacy, please take 4 minutes and 40 seconds to watch the video below which summarizes the empirical evidence on efficacy and perceptions surrounding open textbooks.
Students spend a lot of money on textbooks. Alternatives to the expensive textbooks that come from commercial publishers are open educational resources, or OER. But, are these free resources as effective or of the same quality as textbooks? The research says yes. The animation summarizes the available research synthesized by Dr. John Hilton III in the aforementioned paper.
The rest of our animations are on our YouTube channel, ResearchShorts, and appear below:
The Life Between Big Data Log Events: Learners’ Strategies to Overcome Challenges in MOOCs
YouTube URL: https://youtu.be/O-Wn9ryJM6w
Veletsianos, G. (2013). Open Practices and Identity: Evidence from Researchers and Educators’ Social Media Participation. British Journal of Educational Technology, 44(3), 639-651.
I have proposed a session for the SXSWedu conference. The sessions to be presented are partly decided by community votes and comments. If you feel that my proposal is interesting or worthwhile, would you consider voting for it? You will need to create an account and register to do so. Here’s my proposal in detail:
Description: The mass media have embraced MOOCs and celebrated the disruptive nature of online education and the death of higher education institutions. On the other hand, critics’ responses to MOOCs have ranged from fetishizing face-to-face education to questioning the potential of technology. Both of these positions miss the research surrounding online education and the potential role that MOOCs may play in society. In this presentation, I will discuss how some MOOCs can be more appropriately described as commodified education, rather than the type of open education initiatives suggested by their acronym. The goal of this critique is to help us envision MOOCs as a means for powerful learning experiences and personally relevant/meaningful transformation. This can be attained through the following:
– Design opportunities that allow engagement beyond course activities
– Design for lasting impression
– Design for intrigue, risk-taking, and challenge
– Design for engagement and reflection
Questions Answered:
How do we create MOOCs that are exciting, that pull learners into the experience and hold their attention?
How do we design MOOCs that foster powerful and meaningful learning experiences?
How do we use emerging technologies to create learning *experiences* rather than efficient products?
Tags
online education, mooc, research
Format: Solo Presentation
Category: OER and MOOCs
Level: Intermediate
Speakers: George Veletsianos, The University of Texas at Austin