Online Learning and MOOCs

Working meeting: Thurs Nov. 29, 3:30pm-5:00pm

What do we want to achieve?

I'd be interested in hearing about: (a) status quo on Coursera courses (b) status quo on UBC tech & admin support for online courses (if any) (c) reasons for and against investing heavily in online courses

-- MichielVanDePanne - 01 Oct 2012

all of the above.

-- KevinLeytonBrown - 03 Oct 2012

With regard to (c), I'm interested in better understanding how current developments with online learning and MOOCS can help us provide the best education that we can for our students.

I'm also interested in thoughts on whether the department should provide resources to faculty who are developing MOOCS on an ongoing basis, and if so, what types of resources and based on what criteria.

-- AnneCondon - 09 Oct 2012

Given the interest in the topic, we (Anne, Gregor, Raymond, Michiel and I) have arranged a working meeting on Online Learning to be held Thu., Nov. 29, 3:30pm-5:00pm in X836. (It's in the CS events calendar - mark yours:

https://www.cs.ubc.ca/news-events/calendar/2012-11-29

By online learning we mean the full spectrum from simply uploading our lectures, putting them on YouTube on the UBC CS channel, through the flipped classroom to the full-on MOOC experience (making and using same).

There have been many recent developments we could discuss. Another reason for doing this is simply that the topic cuts across many of our committee mandates. I count seven with a finger in the pie: Program Experience, Science Education Initiative, Teaching and Learning Services, Communications, Space and Safety, Faculty Affairs and Computing. So there's a need for communication, coordination and for some mandate engineering.

Do we need a single forum? What should that be? How should we coordinate? Do we need more transparency? What support is available? Where is this all going? .....

We'll need to decide what we want to achieve in this meeting and how to structure it. To that end Michiel has created a twiki page where you can leave suggestions as to what you want to get out of this meeting:

https://bugs.cs.ubc.ca/cgi-bin/twiki/logon/Faculty/OnlineLearning

And we encourage people to discuss the topic there. We can start the conversation at the Brown Bag lunch tomorrow. This should get it going:

http://www.technologyreview.com/featured-story/429376/the-crisis-in-higher-education/

-- AlanMackworth - 04 Oct 2012

Good article on the Canadian angle:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/time-to-lead/building-open-learning-platforms-in-canada/article4595536/

-- AlanMackworth - 08 Oct 2012

Copied from faculty email thread:

Vardi does not answer the question in his title. And he seems to want to play King Canute. He states: "no business model has emerged for MOOC-based education."

But Thrun says he's found it (and the VCs believe him):

http://allthingsd.com/20121025/education-start-up-udacity-raises-funds-from-andreessen-horowitz/

Michiel and I tried to get people to use the wiki:

https://bugs.cs.ubc.ca/cgi-bin/twiki/view/Faculty/OnlineLearning

to discuss this and prepare for our working meeting. But no luck - that's too much overhead - no notifications? It's an important topic But we think we should keep the clutter out of the faculty list - maybe that's not an issue. Would people prefer to use a list they can sign up for?

- Alan

On Thu, Oct 25, 2012 at 8:25 AM, Holger H. Hoos <hoos@cs.ubc.ca> wrote: > An interesting view on the topic, from the editor in chief of Communications of the ACM (hot off e press):
>
> http://delivery.acm.org/10.1145/2370000/2366317/p5-vardi.pdf?ip=64.46.3.10&acc=OPEN&CFID=132282402&CFTOKEN=22415908&__acm__=1351178903_6bb9079704ea4d1ac600564c5c39245b
>
> Enjoy!
>
> Holger
>

-- AlanMackworth - 25 Oct 2012