elearning_label_higher_education

“Analyzing hidden semantics in social bookmarking of open educational resources” discusses the possibilities of using the crowd-sourcing phenomenon of social bookmarking for extracting semantics from the tags added by delicious users which describe links related to open educational resources (OER).

Author Julià Minguillón suggests the use of a simple statistical analysis tool to discover which tags create clusters that can be semantically interpreted. The obtained results are compared with a collection of resources related to OER in order to better understand the real needs of people searching for these.

Stakeholders include education administrators, teachers and university staff. From the world of work, the project welcomes the participation of companies, chambers of commerce, trainers, associations and government staff.

Three SIGs have already been opened, in order to encourage debate around:

• Web2.0 and Internet resources – how do we evaluate these tools and their uses
• Learning and training pedagogies – how do we teach and train using Web2.0
• Curriculum including criteria for excellence and quality – how do we build curricula for Web2.0 or integrate Web2.0 into existing ones

The Ed2.0Work project SIGs are open communities and are free to use. Click here to register and indicate your area or areas of interest.

Ed2.0Work is a transnational EU-funded project involving partners from the UK, Austria, Belgium, Estonia, Poland, Romania, Spain and Turkey. For more information  you may visit this website.

MOOCs charge no tuition and are open to anybody with Internet access. The average number of students per class is 33,000, but classes can surmount 80,000. Originally, state universities and community colleges were the ones to offer these classes, but institutions such as Stanford, Princeton, and Duke are also embarking on this new approach to education.

Most professors agreed that their interest was motivated by their belief in more economically accessible education. Others, however, found globally sharing their subjects more appealing. In addition, some claimed that online teaching helped them reconsider their own pedagogical methods and believed that it improved them. Overall, the survey concluded that most argued in favor of incorporating these types of courses into traditional education.

MOOCs decrease the cost of earning a degree and make college experience less expensive. John Owens, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of California at Davis, teaches parallel computing, a method that allows computers to multitask at once. 15,000 students enrolled for his class at absolutely no cost and were able to learn in a flexible and personal way.

These courses are also readily available to anyone across the world. Princeton University professor Robert Sedgewick co-lead an online class on algorithms, which he had taught for forty years in a classroom. Initially skeptical about online education, he nonetheless was intrigued by the idea of reaching a global audience of over 80,000 students. He signed a deal with Coursera, an upstart company offering MOOCs, and spent copious hours preparing and videotaping his lectures. The experience was rewarding, he feels, and he is now enthusiastic about including online components to his teaching.

Online platforms also grant the chance for instructors to acquire teaching tips. Computer programs collect data that track each student’s success and failures and most professors are attracted to this quality since this information cannot be gleaned so precisely from traditional classroom participation. An associate professor of physics at Duke University, M. Ronen Plesser, found that videotaping lectures also forced him to reevaluate his pedagogical presentation in class. His style is much more rigorous and demanding than it was before he taught a MOOC since “producing video lectures spurred [him] to hone pedagogical presentation to a far higher level than I had in 10 years of teaching the class on campus.”

MOOCs are transforming higher education by make learning less expensive, more accessible, and educationally rewarding. Society increasingly prioritizes technology and many professors admitted that not adapting to this would imply lagging behind professionally. Mr. Owens acknowledged that he “would rather understand this at the front end than be forced into it on the back end.”