From a Jisc press release:
Over 14,000 items of archived TV footage from 17 European countries are now available via the EUscreen online portal for teaching, research and general interest.
EUscreen – the result of a collaboration between 36 partners across Europe – provides a rich insight into Europe’s television heritage with content dating from the 1920s to the present day.
The portal includes rare footage and commentary on key events in history, including a 1962 interview with Martin Luther King about racial discrimination in the US.
John Ellis, Professor of Media Arts at Royal Holloway and principal investigator on the EUscreen project, said: “This is a valuable resource for anyone interested in social history or indeed TV history, as it brings together tens of thousands of clips from across Europe. The portal is available to anyone (not only academics) and it is very easy to get absorbed and spend hours browsing all of the footage.”
The expansive footage has also proved popular as a learning aid for foreign language students, with clips available in 14 languages.
By the end of September 2012, there will be around 30,000 items of digital content freely available on the portal as the European providers continue to add carefully selected material.
Explore the EUscreen footage
Open online seminar
Jisc are hosting an open, online seminar on ‘Making Assessment Count (MAC)’ on Friday 3rd Feb – 1-2pm. The presenters are Professor Peter Chatterton (Daedalus e-World Ltd) and Professor Gunter Saunders (University of Westminster).
The mailing for the seminar says” “The objective of Making Assessment Count is primarily to help students engage more closely with the assessment process, either at the stage where they are addressing an assignment or at the stage when they receive feedback on a completed assignment. In addition an underlying theme of MAC is to use technology to help connect student reflections on their assessment with their tutors. To facilitate the reflection aspect of MAC a web based tool called e-Reflect is often used. This tool enables the authoring of self-review questionnaires by tutors for students. On completion of an e-Reflect questionnaire a report is generated for the student containing responses that are linked to the options the student selected on the questionnaire.”
You can find out more ans sign up for the seminar at http://jiscmac.eventbrite.co.uk/
EC-TEL 2012
The EC-TEL 2012: Seventh European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning 21st Century Learning for 21st Century Skills takes place on 18-21 September 2012 at Saarbrücken in Germany.
The focus for the conference includes:
- How can schools prepare young people for the technology-rich workplace of the future?
- How can we use technology to promote informal and independent learning outside traditional educational settings?
- How can we use next generation social and mobile technologies to promote informal and responsive learning?
The deadline for proposals is April 2.
Visitors and Residents
David White (University of Oxford) and Dr. Lynn Silipigni Connaway (OCLC) have been attracting quite a stir with their JISC-funded work on Visitors and Residents: What Motivates Engagement with the Digital Information Environment?, being undertaken as part of the Developing Digital Literacies programme webinar series.
Slides, audio and a recording of the Blackboard Collaborate session where they presented some of the findings of their work can be found at http://bit.ly/jiscdiglitvr.
The keynotes, videos, radio shows and interviews from the ECER 2010 Conference in Helsinki:
All fine and dandy!
The Chinese teachers have the resources and the willing. That is basically what it takes (one of the most important part = inner motivation). Hwever, it’s my opinion that if they are beginners, the massive course should be divided into smaller clusters – because then people would be more compelled to get started, and above all to remain in the group.
I really value what G. Siemens and S. Downes have done. Most people are critical of it, but the fact is that they have created an amazing opportunity for people to network, to connect to other like-minded educators, and thus learn in a connected world, and for free (very important too). Nevertheless, it’s my impressiontoo (and I might be wrong) that the group that stayed coherent, as part of this experience, is amller than the one that started, and above all it is mainly composed by people who already were quite comfortable with ICT and were used to this new way of learning.
My expereince in EVO (TESOL – CALL-IS) is different, since we never get that huge number of people. But we do get numbers like 200 in the first week, then it starts to schrink.
I know we can’t aim at everyone, and that there will always be people who change their minds after a while, but in an age where we place the individual in the centre, we also need to create instances where the learning environment becomes rather personalized and comfy!
Having said that I still run EVO workshops and I love them. But I also host workshps on knowschool with Max. 20 people, two moderators, and a supporter. The environment is great, because you get like 90% of the members participating.
I think for beginners it might be less intimidating. But there is nothing like trying!
> Most people are critical of it…
Do you really perceive that? From my perspective, most people have been supportive…
Anyhow…
The total course ‘sign-ups’ were about 2200 people.
There remain about 1880 people signed up to the ‘Daily’ email list.
Participation in the Moodle forum and the Elluminate discussions has dropped sharply.
So what can we say about that?
Yes, it’s true that “it’s my impression too (and I might be wrong) that the group that stayed coherent, as part of this experience, is smaller than the one that started.”
Which would be a concern if ‘group coherence’ was one our objectives going in. But it wasn’t. Quite the opposite – we encouraged distributed participation (indeed, one participant was harshly critical, saying I was trying to steer people aware from the coherent group activities, and toward independent activities).
Like the Work Literacy project, our course was structured as follows: “First of all, we developed all activities for three levels of participation: Spectator; Joiner; and Creator. The majority fell into the first category and the Creators took on the role of facilitating where necessary.”
http://www.jarche.com/2008/11/post-work-literacy/
There are elements of the course – the Google Group, Connectivitas, for example, or the Chilbo community in Second Life – that I don’t know about in any sort of detail. I will be speaking to the Spanish Second Life group next week – it will be my first encounter with many people in that group.
The point (to my mind) of a MOOC is that you do *not* attempt to create a ‘coherent group’ – it is exactly this practices that abuts us up against limits of scale and manageability. Rather, we allow students to form groups if they wish, but we do not require it.
I don’t depict the lowering of numbers as ‘shrinkage’. Rather, I see it as a restructuring of participation, as some who offer more input at the start remain on the fringe for most of the course. Provided we maintain some link to them (that’s why the Daily is so important) they continue to participate as a spectator.
Tend to agree with you Stephen. I see the MOOC as open networked communities and in that regard scaling up may increase the opportunities for learning. Forms and levels of particpation are somthing which may take some time to fall out of the MOOC experince and for us to understand. But then the big question for me is what sort of support and approaches ot teaching and learning we adopt to support such networked participation. The Connectivism course provides us a great test bed for that.
There must be a middle ground. Large US state universities, think UCLA, have for a long time practiced what might be called MONOCs (massively open not online courses
Pretty much anyone could come to the lecture series and the better teachers were and are able to use techniques in rooms of nearly 1,000 people to get discussion going in the auditorium: buzz groups, cascades, etc. These are not completely unlike the threads that were a feature of #CCK08 discussions. But, as Cristina said, there is great learning and assessment value in smaller facilitated (peer or asymmetric) groups. MONOCs have a small army of graduate teaching assistants who run seminar groups around the MONOC. A feature of many MONOCs is that participation has several dominant modes: lecture/no-seminar, seminar/no-lecture, lecture/seminar, no-lecture/no-seminar. Blended massive open courses add modalities through podcasts, asynchronous and synchronous discussion fora. The University of Missouri was running open discussion boards for MIT’s open courseware fora, for example. UC Berkley podcasts damn near every lecture.
Coherence can mean integration of diverse elements rather than some sort of congruence/consensus. CCK08 also marches in step to some extent, with weekly schedules and timetabled synchronous events.
It will be interesting to see what happens to blogs and forums when it has finished.
Stephen Downes and George Siemens modeled and demonstrated the role of “teacher” in open massive courses. As mentioned in our weekly Ustream live session today, when we learn on open spaces we become teachers by default, you learn by observing others and vice versa.
Others may like or dislike the way you handle and process information, they have other models to chose from.
Graham, I think that a MOOC might work well for your purposes. You’re talking about 800 participants. Your question about how will you organize support may be broken down to little steps; I mean, to define support for what. Technical support, concepts support, etc. You’ll need volunteers to moderate. As Cristina mentions, the EVO sessions are great providing support but they handle less numbers.
I know that somehow you’ll find a way to solve this issues, you have a great project here.
See you around. Maru
Actually a dropout rate of 2200 down to 1880 is very small (10%). This is much better than the dropout rate in traditional university courses even those with small classes. AND what is better a course of 30 students where 3 drop out and 25 complete successfully OR a course of 2 million students where 1 million drop out and 800 000 complete successfully. We need to rethink whether or not completion rates are determinants of quality. In fact in traditional classes the ‘quality” of classes was considered higher when they had a higher drop out rate. I would suggest that in the 21st Century where we are challenged to educate 6 billion people, that having Mass courses with high dropout rates will serve us better than having elite courses with few students and few droputs.
All the best
Rory
Hi, I am interesting in MOOC, and I am doing a project of MOOC of china, I searched MOOC in google, but I cat find more valued information, so I want to jion your group,may be it existing, to share my opinion. thanks.