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iandolphin24: @paulwalk I was particularly glad I wasn't traveling on ....

iandolphin24: Train guard just announced that passengers proceeding to Scarborough would experience a set change at Hull. I'm sure that's what he said...

(this is a draft of an abstract for an upcoming talk I am giving – comments welcome) The idea of moving educational content to the web to make it more scalable has been around since the mid-1990s. Almost as soon as the web was widely used, one of the first imagined uses would be moving classroom instruction onto the web and achieving economies of scale using the web. While the idea seemed obvious and felt like it would quickly become a solved problem, repeated attempts to replicate the classroom experience at scale achieved only disappointing results. At some point, it seemed to many people that if the problem of teaching on the web at scale remained unsolved after 20 years – that perhaps it was simply not possible. But recently with the breakthrough Stanford AI class with over 160,000 students and the rapid development of efforts like Coursera, Udacity, and edX, it seems like Massively Online Open Courses (MOOCs) are seeing significant investment and amazing growth. What is different? What has changed? What is unique about MOOCs? Why does it seem like the same idea that has failed so may times before will finally work this time? Will these new MOOCs succeed or be just another hopeful experiment that ultimately fails in the long term? This talk will look at what it is like to develop and teach a Coursera course from a teacher’s perspective. Dr. Severance is teaching a course titled Internet History, Technology and Security on Coursera on July 23. Teaching with Coursera is part of a long-term effort that he started in 1996, when he developed the first lecture capture system called Sync-O-Matic in order to move his courses to the web when his students were using 28.8 modems. He will look at where Coursera is unique, different, and what is new and compare it to previous effort. Dr. Charles Severance University of Michigan School of Information www.dr-chuck.com

(this is a draft of an abstract for an upcoming talk I am giving – comments welcome)

The idea of moving educational content to the web to make it more scalable has been around since the mid-1990s. Almost as soon as the web was widely used, one of the first imagined uses would be moving classroom instruction onto the web and achieving economies of scale using the web. While the idea seemed obvious and felt like it would quickly become a solved problem, repeated attempts to replicate the classroom experience at scale achieved only disappointing results. At some point, it seemed to many people that if the problem of teaching on the web at scale remained unsolved after 20 years – that perhaps it was simply not possible. But recently with the breakthrough Stanford AI class with over 160,000 students and the rapid development of efforts like Coursera, Udacity, and edX, it seems like Massively Online Open Courses (MOOCs) are seeing significant investment and amazing growth.

What is different? What has changed? What is unique about MOOCs? Why does it seem like the same idea that has failed so may times before will finally work this time? Will these new MOOCs succeed or be just another hopeful experiment that ultimately fails in the long term?

This talk will look at what it is like to develop and teach a Coursera course from a teacher’s perspective. Dr. Severance is teaching a course titled Internet History, Technology and Security on Coursera on July 23. Teaching with Coursera is part of a long-term effort that he started in 1996, when he developed the first lecture capture system called Sync-O-Matic in order to move his courses to the web when his students were using 28.8 modems. He will look at where Coursera is unique, different, and what is new and compare it to previous effort.

Dr. Charles Severance
University of Michigan School of Information
www.dr-chuck.com

iandolphin24: A day off.

iandolphin24: Benefit cuts for blind people http://t.co/ppRmxtJ8 (Independent).

iandolphin24: Sakai Board monthly meeting concluded on time, at 10pm local. Time for bed.

iandolphin24: Early bird registration for the Jasig Sakai Conference 2012 closes on the 15th! http://t.co/xWKjPqEH

There will be a short period of downtime on Tuesday 29th May between 7am and 9am so that we can perform a major upgrade to WebLearn. We will be moving to a service based on Sakai 2.8 which offers a number of improvements in key areas: Big improvements to Sign-up tool based on user feedback (categories, change organiser, auto create groups, prevent withdrawing when closed, better export (compatible with OXCORT) Many improvements to the Forums tool (including better user interface (UI), photos of author Improved webservices interface which can be exploited by Mobile Oxford New Profile tool with Social networking facilities New improved Email Sender tool (replaces Mailtool) Improved wiki UI Improved tool permissions ‘widget’ SES tool bug fixes Site templates facility – it will be possible to base a new site upon a selection made from a choice of templates each tailored for a specific situation and each containing their own help and guidance.

There will be a short period of downtime on Tuesday 29th May between 7am and 9am so that we can perform a major upgrade to WebLearn.

We will be moving to a service based on Sakai 2.8 which offers a number of improvements in key areas:

• Big improvements to Sign-up tool based on user feedback (categories, change organiser, auto create groups, prevent withdrawing when closed, better export (compatible with OXCORT)
• Many improvements to the Forums tool (including better user interface (UI), photos of author
• Improved webservices interface which can be exploited by Mobile Oxford
• New Profile tool with Social networking facilities
• New improved Email Sender tool (replaces Mailtool)
• Improved wiki UI
• Improved tool permissions ‘widget’
• SES tool bug fixes
• Site templates facility – it will be possible to base a new site upon a selection made from a choice of templates each tailored for a specific situation and each containing their own help and guidance.

iandolphin24: Waiting to disembark at Hull Europort. #fb

£100 million for new research facilities http://t.co/3gvFxcQf

Tags: twitter