Weekly Sporto bookmarks (weekly)

• Research on digital learning faces uncertain future as funding sources and inquiry approaches vary

  tags: research digital-learning funding inquiry

• Measuring the Impact of the Quality Matters Rubric™: A Discussion of Possibilities: American Journal of Distance Education: Vol 29, No 3

  tags: quality matters QM impact AJDE rubric journal distance education

• Interpreting what is Required for “Regular and Substantive Interaction” – WCET Frontiers

  tags: interaction WCET forum

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Weekly Sporto bookmarks (weekly)

• The MOOC-Courseware Convergence –

  tags: MOOC moocs feldstein e-Literate courseware

  • Because that is exactly what Coursera has explicitly become with their Courseware for Campus offering: a courseware provider.
  • The less obvious part is that MOOC design and courseware design have been converging for some time now.
  • And even less obvious is that the Venn diagram of courseware companies and OPM companies is starting to overlap significantly.
  • From its inception, the design model of xMOOCs began decoupling faculty course design from faculty course delivery
  • "any of the courses that have been authored on Coursera come with an out-of-the-box analytics platform." If those analytics look anything like the picture above—and I would bet money that they do—then the courses have been built on a backward design philosophy like the one I have been describing in my recent post series on content as infrastructure.
  • As I wrote repeatedly throughout that series, almost every professionally designed course uses that design pattern. And Coursera is known for having strong professional course design support
  • That content pattern is the revolution of our time
  • For one thing, while xMOOCs have a bad reputation for anemic social interaction relative to other course models, they probably have more social interaction designed into them than many commercially published courseware titles.
  • LMS developers have to optimize for a wide range of faculty preferences, teaching styles, and teaching conditions. They have to accommodate every grading scheme imaginable. They have to handle huge classes and tiny classes. They have to deal with face-to-face, online, and blended. Constructivist, lecture, and whatever else. That's why they spend so much time adding grade book micro-features and then optimizing the usability to handle all those micro-features without being totally overwhelming.
  • Courseware developers, in contrast, have to optimize for the content. If the subject is software development, then you need an interactive code editor and test engine. If it's accounting, then you need a test engine that looks like a spreadsheet. If it's chemistry, then you need a molecule visualizer and manipulator.
  • Which side of the divide do MOOC platforms land on?
  • These subject-specific affordances, plus competency-based analytics, were the platform highlights of the Coursera for Campus presentation. Not the grade book that can do anything. Not the test engine that can provide any kind of feedback. Not announcements or an event feed. This was all about courseware.
  • there were two major barriers. First, as a print-centric company in the midst of a transition, the authoring tools were not remotely faculty-friendly. And second, as a publisher whose bread and butter came from royalties, there was a fear of cannibalization of the business.
  • Coursera has neither of those problems. It was born as a two-sided market, which means that it never owned the content to begin with and always had an incentive to make authoring as easy as possible.
  • Authoring support can work with a courseware platform as long as the range of course expectations for delivery models can be constrained. And MOOC courseware fits the bill. It's a genre.
  • Coursera for Campus is a harbinger of the future, not for the LMS industry but for the textbook industry. And they are an early mover with certain advantages in their business model
  • implications for the OPM market.
  • (a) Coursera has been pushing into that market aggressively and successfully and (b) that market has been under massive pressure and upheaval lately.
  • The obvious one is cost. The less obvious one is geography. It turns out that, even in an era when people can take courses from anywhere in the world, they will tend to take them from their local institution or not at all.
  • So the next sustainability play is not so much about reaching students far away as it is about serving students you already reach for 40 years rather than for four.
  • They were talking about lifelong learning. Skilling and reskilling.
  • From an OPM perspective, this pitch gives the company with the large catalog of low-cost and constantly refreshed inventory a competitive advantage
  • But I do think that they oversimplified, and that running a highly successful program at scale with a 90%+ degree completion rate entails a lot more than just handing out a piece of sheep skin at the end.
  • The gap between "MOOC" the course model and "MOOC" the courseware model is very much an open question in terms of student success
  • Coursera on Campus, in addition to creating an additional revenue stream for the company and putting pressure on courseware providers, potentially ups the ante in the OPM market.
  • But we need to look to those universities which are pioneering affordable degrees at scale to understand the service gaps, marketing gaps, and cost differences between MOOC courseware and the totality of what they are doing in order to understand the what it would take to replicate their success.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.