Posts Tagged ‘edX’
If you follow me on twitter you must have seen my tweets from the edX global forum in Washington DC from 8th Nov till the 10th. As an early adopter of MOOC, we have been extremely happy with our decision to get into MOOCs as well as with the success of our MOOCs. Measure of success is clearly in the eyes of the beholder. Those who are non-believers will point to the very poor completion rates (compared to the initial registration). Those of us who believe that MOOCs have a place in Higher Education will point to a whole list of other things – those who complete our MOOCs are still several multiples of face to face class size, our faculty are engaging with the global audience to help them learn the “liberal arts” way, they are learning from teaching in a new platform to a global audience for the benefit of the students in face to face classes, our students say that the MOOCs help them as a valuable additional resource to their face to face class etc. We are not going to settle this debate any time soon, so let us move on.
I thoroughly enjoyed the meeting. The presentations and panels were impressive. The networking was excellent. I got to meet a lot of people from Europe, some from Jordan, a few from Japan. I was fascinated to meet a young man from Sri Lanka who supports MOOCs from Kyoto University. Of course, he does not speak Japanese and I found out that he is a vegetarian. Talk about an outlier! It is also fair to say that he would be one of the rare Sinhalese Vegetarian.
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From: a tweet by Jane O’Dwyer – http://bit.ly/1uvRtQM%5B/caption%5D
I was at the edX Global Forum last week. This is a meeting attended by faculty and staff from edX member institutions. This was my second one and the number of attendees and the diversity of institutions they represent have grown tremendously. It was great to meet several new people, including several from edX with whom I have only had phone contact. Because of our early start and the fact that we have completed four courses through WellesleyX, many attendees were eager to talk to me about our experiences.
Of all the talks and sessions I attended, the best was a student panel. Nine students from MIT, BU and Wellesley (may be Harvard also) who have taken “blended” classes discussed their experiences. Wellesley student Sharvari Johari is seated fourth from the left in the picture. She did a terrific job as a panelist. In almost all the courses these students took, their faculty taught a face to face class and was either teaching the same course at the same time on edX or had used an archived edX course that the faculty member had taught before. It was refreshing to hear directly from them for a variety of reasons, primarily because they are not afraid to express their opinions.
They liked the experience overall
All the students liked several aspects of the blended experience. The most liked aspects of the blended experience was the availability of the materials outside the classroom and the “stress free” assessment. Seven of the nine students are STEM majors and the courses that they took had assessments that are multiple choice questions which allowed multiple tries and provided a detailed answers that they could look up after completing the assessment. One of them mentioned how the stress of having to get the correct answer in a given period of time is a bit too much and many a times one is penalized for making silly numerical mistakes. Whereas in this medium, the focus is on learning. If you made a mistake, the explanation provided helps guide you to do it right the next time around.
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I can’t believe that today is the last day of September! Where does the time go? It was approximately 35 years ago that I came to this country. I arrived in JFK on Sunday, Sep 10th, totally lost. When I was about to leave, a relative of mine asked where in NY I was going to “is it Manhattan island?”. Of course, I knew my Chemistry and Math really well, but not geography! I had no clue. I was waiting at the airport for an Indian grad student from Hunter College to pick me up, except no one was seeking me. After a long wait and nervousness, another Indian person looking for someone else from my flight asked if I saw “a dark Indian guy with glasses”. I said to myself, “that would be three quarters of all Indians in the flight”. Then he asked me who I was waiting for and when I told him, he could not stop laughing “Vasu is happily watching football in his apartment!”. It turns out that the telegram I sent before I left, which was strategically sent just a couple of hours before my flight on Saturday, was addressed to his Hunter College address on a wekend. I later found out that telegrams were not as reliable here as they were in India! Of course, now those who arrive from India are so savvy that they become my GPS! Sometimes I get irritated (sorry) and take an alternate route.
Before I get carried too far… As you may know, Wellesley’s first ever MOOC, Introduction to Human Evolution, taught by Adam van Arsdale, opened last Wednesday, September 25th. It is an important step for our grand experiment. Adam worked extremely hard to make this happen and edX staff keep telling us how he is a natural and this is one of the courses that have gone through very smoothly, including the opening day. Many of us have been watching some of the early discussions with enthusiasm. I have watched several of the videos and looked at the problem sets etc. They are really cool! The diversity of students in terms of the many dimensions of the data collected – gender, highest degree, the location etc – are fascinating. There will be more to come…
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Though we had an excellent start of the semester, there were two nagging issues we needed to solve. One had to do with the print management software called Papercut and the other had to with Macs in classrooms. The first issue was related to one of the unusually busy printing season – first two weeks of the semester. In addition, we are now using multi function devices for printing and in order to support them, we needed to move the print server to Windows server, the only supported platform. The Mac issue had to do with the way we have been reusing the computer names and how this “confuses” the active directory, resulting in the users not be able to login to the domain. Notice that both of these problems are related to Microsoft backend technologies. Just sayin’…
Thanks to the teamwork by LTS staff and their hard work, both of these problems seem to be under control. Another case that illustrates that no matter how hard you work to avoid these problems, the real field testing happens only when our faculty and students are here. This is why the best strategies are one that allows us to be prepared and solve the problems quickly. We can never rest saying “we have tested everything and they work”. No, they don’t, sorry!
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After several days of coordination and preparation, we successfully announced the first four Wellesley courses to be offered in WellesleyX, our grand MOOC experiment. They are:
- Introduction to Human Evolution, taught by Adam Van Arsdale, Fall 2013
- Was Alexander Great? The Life, Leadership, and Legacies of History’s Greatest Warrior, taught by Guy Rogers, Spring 2014
- Introduction to Global Sociology, taught by Smitha Radhakrishnan, Fall 2014
- Shakespeare: On the Page and in Performance, taught by Yu Jin Ko, with Diego Arciniegas as a partner teacher, Fall 2014
After our announcement in Dec 2012, the Provost created an ad hoc WellesleyX committee and invited proposals from the faculty. When the process closed on March 1, we had several excellent proposals that the committee reviewed and presented their feedback based on which these four were selected as the first four courses. As you can see from the description of these courses, they are excellent choices with a diverse set of topics. These faculty are excited to be experimenting with this new medium and have great ideas for the students. We are excited to offer support and also learn through this process.
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It is snowing again, so what’s new? I was at a conference organized by MIT and Harvard on “Online Learning and the Future of Residential Education” last weekend. I was able to go only for part of it. On Sunday evening I attended a dinner & listened to Drew Faust, president of Harvard, Rafael Reif, president of MIT and Gene Sperling, Director, National Economic Council and Assistant to the President for Economic Policy talk about the broader issues surrounding the online education as a disruption. I was actually going to blog about that, but I found that Tom Friedman, who attended the conference did a great job in this piece yesterday in NY Times, so I won’t repeat it.
I was sitting next to Daphne Koller from Stanford, and the co-founder of Coursera. We had very interesting conversation. I also thanked Eric Grimson for his wonderful Introduction to Computer Science & Programming class in edX. The place was packed with many of the well known names from MIT & Harvard and over 60 other institutions. I had a chance to connect with some of the liberal arts college folks that were there and with a friend who works at MIT after a long time. He and I overlapped in College in India, and connected back in the mid-80’s here. He is such a busy guy, it is so hard to find a time to meet with him. So it was good to catch up.
I also visited Bates on Monday to participate in a panel where I was asked to talk about WellesleyX. It was a beautiful drive, but I wonder whether all of the drive was worth it. I could have done the same job remotely. Oh well, we can’t turn the clock back. Wait… May be. I am waiting for that discussion in my Quantum Mechanics class – Tunneling and time reversal and all that jazz.
A few weeks ago I gave a talk to Wellesley faculty and staff on “Milking Google for What it is Worth” which was well attended and I received several emails from the attendees about how they discovered so many capabilities of Google Docs that they were not aware of. I just wanted to recount some of what I talked at that meeting here.
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By now, this is old news. Last week, you all must have seen an announcement that Wellesley has joined edX
and that we plan to offer four courses through edX in what President Bottomly called a Grand Experiment. This decision came after an almost a yearlong internal conversations on what should be Wellesley’s strategy around the MOOCs and generally online education. I am so glad that we are entering into this partnership and that it is clearly an experiment. There are far too many questions than answers and as true academics, when we seek answers, we engage in experiments. There is simply no other way to find out than getting our hands and feet wet.
In general the extended Wellesley community seems excited about this decision. The student reporter who interviewed me on this topic was very excited and talked about how the newspaper, in an earlier editorial had supported Wellesley getting into this realm. She was also excited about the course she was enrolled in and her hands on experience. But, everyone also has a lot of interesting and important questions.
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Final presidential debate is over and done with and the San Francisco Giants quietly came from behind to beat the Cardinals and the World Series is all set. Whether it is the debates or the Yankees losing to the Tigers, there is a lot of spinning going on. In case of politics, the spin rooms are there for this purpose. In sports, it is always the bad calls or the injuries; I guess you can throw money at acquiring all the talented players but you can’t buy their well being and health. I am sure we will all be watching the different polls and other sources such as Intrade during the next few days while also checking the World Series. When I was growing up, the election seasons in Sri Lanka and India were so much fun. There were so many outdoor events where the politicians came and gave fiery speeches, with a lot of warm up acts including music and dance. Finally, when the time came to announce the results, we were up all night listening to the short wave radio, sipping on coffee or chai (which was a predictor of which side you were on!), screaming hard when our parties won a seat and waking up all the neighbors. It was a lot of fun.
I continue to watch Nate Silver’s fivethirtyeight (I should say that I loved it much better the way it was before NY Times took over), Real Clear Politics and Intrade. I check these along with Facebook and Twitter before I even check my emails in the morning. Email is for the older people 🙂 I get so much out of my social media connections. As I have said before, those who I follow have already filtered the news for me so that when I get up, the virtual newspaper is waiting for me from all over the world. It is this concept that is also helping drive the online courses. So, I decided to go back to school to check ’em out.
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During the first week of May, I attended a couple of presentations by students. One was Digital Stories by students in an Education class taught by Soo Hong on topics ranging from bullying in schools to multicultural requirements. The reason why some of us from LTS were invited was because we assisted in providing technology support for the production of these stories and also the class used a software called Mediathread from Columbia University. We also attended a presentation by students from CS 349A taught by Eni Mustafaraj who demonstrated a course recommendation system which uses a cosine similarity function to compare past history of classes taken by students to suggest courses of interest to other students. Both were very impressive and as I mentioned to some of my colleagues, I was pleasantly surprised by how well the students collaborated to produce the course recommendation system so quickly.
I am sure that all of us have heard about edX by now, a joint venture by MIT and Harvard to offer online courses for enhancing teaching and learning all around the world. In addition, earlier, we all heard about Stanford’s online courses and to a lesser extent, Yale’s Open Yale Courses. In a recent article in the Chronicle highlighting the company 2tor is also relevant to this discussion in that they are looking to extend their offerings and are talking to a lot of institutions. So, I thought, it is probably a good time for me to express my views on this subject.
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