1,720,976 research outputs found
Versioning RLOs as ‘study skills toolkits’ for different user groups and developing community tools to support sharing and customisation
No full textAs patterns of need in twenty-first century higher education change so must the solutions. E-learning solutions, in particular, need to be adaptive to fit a range of teaching and learning situations. eLanguages, a research and development unit at the University of Southampton, develops online toolkits of reusable learning objects (RLOs) in Study Skills that can be versioned for different student user groups. Underpinning them is an approach which seeks to deliver high quality content and be cost-effective. Reusability and versatility are central to this. With the creation of a large base of RLOs has come recognition of the need to manage and customise these resources easily and a suite of tools enabling such actions has been developed. This paper will present the toolkits and the pedagogic design of the RLOs. The web-based tools to support management and customisation of RLOs, and potentially facilitate new toolkit creation, will also be introduced
Preparing to ride giant waves: developing procedural decision-making processes to support massive online courses
No full textIn 2013, we launched our first Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) in a joint venture with Futurelearn. This was our first experience of riding the large waves of providing online support for a course with literally thousands of online learners. Afterwards we evaluated this provision and applied the lessons learned in the second iteration of the course in Spring 2014. As MOOCs continue to gain popularity and course registration numbers in the UK continue to increase we realised that we need to be gearing up to be able to ride giants.Our session is important to the field of online learner support as we focus on ways of developing procedural decision-making processes to support effective online facilitation of a massive number of learners.Our presentation is likely to be of interest to practitioners, researchers, academic content creators and project managers.The presentation will be evenly distributed in two halves. During the first half, we will outline the main challenges we met, and the evaluation we made of them. In the second half, we will describe the protocols we developed, and will illustrate how we applied these protocols using specific scenarios.The FutureLearn platform is currently unique with its one-step-one-discussion forum approach and our experience so far of delivering three MOOCs indicates that this encourages online participation (Nelson 2014). Steps may include videos, articles, activities, quizzes, or bespoke discussion activities which become common spaces where learners can share their insights, concerns, opinions, doubts, questions, and suggestions.This affordance posed two main challenges, the first being in supporting massive participation from such a gigantic learning community, as there were individual steps that recorded over a thousand comments. To accommodate this challenge, a facilitation team was created, in turn giving rise to the second challenge, facilitator management. It turned out that procedural decision-making was required on an almost daily basis.The scenarios we describe will range from specific content-based questions from learners to technical troubleshooting, code of conduct breakage, identification of activity peaks, assessment issues and facilitator hours allocation. It should be noted that, although our protocols were design to operate within the pedagogical structure of the FutureLearn platform, we understand that many of the scenarios described here can emerge in other platforms with different forum distributions (Brinton et al 2013).Brinton, C. G. et al (2013). Learning about social learning in MOOCs: from statistical analysis to generative model. Cornell University Library Xiv:1312.2159.Accessed from http://arxiv.org/abs/1312.2159Nelson S. (2014). Updated numbers from our platform. FutureLearn Blog. Accessed from https://about.futurelearn.com/blog/updated-numbers
MOOCs and their influence on higher education institutions: Perspectives from the insiders
No full textSince Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) became a global phenomenon in 2012, there has been constant evolution in the way Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) make sense of them. HEIs embracing MOOCs have dedicated a variety of human resource to this venture. Only in a minority of cases, staff have been appointed exclusively to this role. In all other cases, MOOC related tasks have been allocated to professionals who were already performing other educational tasks. This article contains a study that captures the experiences of these professionals in a Spanish university and a British university, as relates to their involvement in MOOCs. Interviews and group sessions were conducted to ascertain the influence of MOOCs in their practice, and in their opinions about the role of MOOCs in their institutions. The results seem to suggest that participants have positive attitudes towards incorporating MOOCs at the university, although they demand a serious bet for this educational approach from the strategic decision makers in the institutions.</p
Making a MOOC: an interdisciplinary approach to teaching Web Science
No full textMOOCs (Massive Online Open Courses) are gradually capturing the public imagination. From experimentalist beginnings in Canada, platforms ranging from ‘homebrew’ to professional have emerged, and although there has been much focus on US platforms, the phenomenon has grown on a worldwide scale. One feature of the early generations of MOOCs has been that courses are typically developed by individual enthusiasts or high profile academics often developing into a cult of personality. in 2012 various UK institutions entered the fray including the Universities of Edinburgh and London who used the US Coursera platform. In 2013 a consortium led by the Open University launched FutureLearn to predominantly host British courses. The University of Southampton was an early FutureLearn partner. This presentation provides an account of the collaborative and interdisciplinary approach adopted in the MOOC ‘Web Science: how the Web is changing the world’. Because Web Science is fundamentally interdisciplinary, this MOOC is not the work of one highly motivated individual, nor is any one individual able to cover the range of specialisms. The course has strong STEM components but encompasses elements of politics, sociology, computer science, mathematics, economics, business and management. The course has been co-ordinated by an educational developer supported by a team of educational specialists working alongside academic ‘educators’. The challenge is to provide coherence and continuity for learners’ experiencing materials drawn from multiple sources and multiple authors. The paper explains the mechanisms to co-ordinate the team and create a consistent learning experience illustrated by evaluations, reflections and user reactions. <br/
Crafting a rich and personal blending learning environment: an institutional case study from a STEM perspective
No full textInstitutional pressures to make optimal use of lecture halls and classrooms can be powerful motivators to identify resources to develop technology enhanced learning approaches to traditional curricula. From the academic’s perspective, engaging students in active learning and reducing the academic workload are important and complementary drivers. This paper presents a case study of a curriculum development exercise undertaken in a STEM subject area at a research-intensive UK university. A multi-skilled team of academics and learning designers have worked collaboratively to build this module which will be realised as a mix of online and face to face activities. Since the module addresses professional issues, a strong emphasis is being placed on establishing authentic learning activities and realistic use of prominent social tools.The learning designers are working for a cross-institutional initiative to support educational innovations; therefore it is important to carefully document the development process and to identify reusable design patterns which can be easily explained to other academics.<br/
Rich and personal agendas: learning from co-creation of an institutional personal learning environment
No full textUniversities increasingly promote their values, educational strengths and standing in order to clearly set themselves apart from fellow institutions. In recent years putting students at the centre of learning has become a prominent theme. Equally, graduates require sophisticated skill-sets which demonstrate digital literacies appropriate to the thought leaders and decision makers of tomorrow. This paper analyses one institution’s approach to creating and supporting an infrastructure for an institutional personal learning environment to support these twin objectives via a case study of curriculum revision. It identifies some of the design patterns and organizational learning which have emerged from this process
Mentoring at scale: MOOC mentor interventions towards a connected learning community
No full textThe “Understanding Language: Learning and Teaching” MOOC produced by the University of Southampton/British Council attracted a large number of enrolments (almost 30,000 active participants) and incorporated a design structure aimed to promote social learning. This combination of high participant numbers and ‘learning as conversation’ approach (Ferguson & Sharples, 2014) posed a significant challenge in terms of course mentoring. This article explores the novel approach to course management and facilitation used on the MOOC, with a particular focus on the training, management, and intervention strategies of course mentors. The paper outlines a cloud based, flexible and collaborative system for managing and connecting mentors which was useful in organizing a geographically distributed group of five mentors. Further, in the context of social learning at scale, a role of ‘mentor as connector’ is proposed to align with the affordances of the MOOC platform and the particular course desig
Visualising the MOOC experience: a dynamic MOOC dashboard built through institutional collaboration
No full textThe Growth of MOOCs is matched by interest into the potential for learninganalytics to provide an objective frame to motivate learners and reveal broaderinsights into learners’ behaviours. Visualising live MOOCs data creates thepotential to provide a manageable and understandable interface to data to helporchestrate learning and inform subsequent stakeholder decisions. This paperpresents outcomes of collaborative work between two European universitiesinvestigating FutureLearn platform datasets. the paper used two examples of thedashboard functionality to explains the rationale for the analytical investigationswhich were performed. One strength of this approach is that it can presentanalytical data to different institutional stakeholders such as learning designers,educators, facilitators, and administrators
MOOCs for Universities and Learners An analysis of motivating factors
No full textMassively Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are a recent introduction to the palette of educational offerings yet in a short time they have become the subject of massive interest and hype. There are those that predict that these free courses are the first ripple in the coming wave of disruption that the web and on-line education will cause to traditional universities. However University investments in producing MOOCs are increasing exponentially and at the same time learners are enthusiastically registering in their tens of thousands for these courses. This paper describes some research into the motivations for universities to create MOOCs and the motivations of learners in registering and completing them. Our results show a spectrum of motivations for universities, and suggest a need for individual universities to be clear of where they sit in that spectrum. For students we see that motivations can vary significantly across cultures
- …
