Posts Tagged ‘MOOC’
I have been pretty bad about not writing for the past several days. I have been very busy – what’s new? The Board of Trustees were here last week. I had to attend a retreat followup and several other meetings. Wellesley faculty did a great job talking about the MOOCs and other blended learning activities taking place at the College. Trustees were very impressed. I was so happy how the faculty acknowledged the partnership with LTS several times. Our staff members who are contributing to all of these collaborations deserve a lot of credit for their enthusiasm, creativity, hard work and patience.
I have been spending every waking moment of the past week thinking about a “competition” that I am part of. Well, it turns out that I was also dreaming about it and waking up in the middle of the night. As I may have mentioned, I am enrolled in a fantastic MOOC – The Analytics Edge. I have learned so much from it in terms of data handling techniques and statistical modeling. I have also learned the open source statistical programming language called R. We have been given access to very interesting data sets for analysis ranging from Framingham Heart Study to data from Netflix as it related to the Netflix Prize.
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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 had committed to be with my colleagues at the campus center a couple of days ago to welcome the first years’ and their parents. For reasons we don’t need to go into here, it was not on my calendar, so I was able to go there only for a few minutes. The place was buzzing with the usual excitement with the first year students, parents and relatives and it did cross my mind that I probably read some of their applications! Though there was a lot of activity, my colleagues told me that though our “stress phish” was very popular and were gone mostly by the time I arrived, there were not that many questions at our table. Phishing has become such a big problem that we are spending inordinate amount of time resolving them and we are out there to increase the awareness.
How times change! There was a time when questions like “How do I get connected to the network?” brought so many of the students and parents to our desk. But, thanks to the advances in technologies as well as the hard work by our staff of planning ahead and being prepared has made many of these to be non-issues. We vastly simplified the wireless guest access and we saw a significant increase in the number of guest wireless connections and to the best of our knowledge, no one needed help. That’s pretty good!
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From: https://www.edx.org/course/mitx/mitx-7-00x-introduction-biology-secret-1014%5B/caption%5D
I had a couple of pretty busy weeks. I traveled to Washington DC for a gathering of fellow CIOs from merged IT-Library organizations. Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) had organized this and a few of us from small liberal arts colleges gathered to discuss organizational makeup, challenges now and going forward. It was a very useful exercise and we all had a great time. There were the usual mixture of agreements and disagreements. My flights were delayed in both directions, which was annoying, but I think this has become the norm. Talking about delays being the norm, it happened again with my doctor who I went to see my physical. He is such a nice person that it didn’t matter much.
The MOOC controversy continues – “After Setbacks, Online Courses are Rethought” and “Speaking Up for the Creditless MOOC” are worthy of reading if you are interested. Wellesley’s first MOOC, “Introduction to Human Evolution” by Adam van Arsdale, will be wrapping up shortly and there has been a constant flow of rave reviews about the course from the students in this class.
I completed my third MOOC – “Introduction to Biology – Secret of Life” taught by Eric Lander. As I have written before, I learned so much in the class and I thoroughly enjoyed it though it was a hard class. I have signed up for my next class “Relativity and Astrophysics” which is slated to begin in February. I am looking forward to it.
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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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Another academic year is coming to an end and these are mostly happy times. Our commencement is still a few days away, but, when I noticed that a friend was off to his son’s graduation at Penn State last weekend, it dawned on me that we are in that season already! I am sure that all those first years who made their college choices are the happiest bunch, dreaming about the college while preparing for high school graduation. I remember those days vividly though it has been a while with our two boys. It is pretty hard for me to believe that this is the third summer for me at Wellesley. Sometimes I feel like I am still settling in – people still have to explain to me certain terms and traditions 🙂
I was invited to go to a gathering of Higher Ed CIOs organized by a company called Consero. I was pretty skeptical about the whole thing. In the end, it was fun and useful. We met for a couple of days in San Diego to discuss various topics that the Higher Ed CIOs are interested in. In many cases, this turned out to be what many Higher Ed CIOs are worried about. Of course there are some who worry more than the others and the worry spectrum is highly influenced by local issues and the type of person the CIO is.
Frankly, though there are some common thread to discussions, the term “Higher Ed” is increasingly appearing to be as challenging as the term “American People”. Private College issues are different from public, large universities are different from small ones, liberal arts colleges seem to worry about completely different things than the rest, so on and so forth. In fact, someone even began making a distinction amongst the liberal arts colleges based on the endowment! The challenge therefore is to pick and choose ways in which you can benefit from these discussions as well as contribute to them in ways that they don’t appear to come from the CIO from a “wealthy”, highly selective, women’s liberal arts college from the state of Massachusetts (and therefore not applicable to the others). Despite all these challenges, we all had one thing in common – we had a lot of fun!
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EDUCAUSE is one conference that I have attended for the last several years. I was not happy that this year’s conference was was scheduled to start on Election Day. I went to our home in CT on Tuesday night and watched the results with my wife, who was pretty nervous, while I was not. As I tweeted that night, In NATE SILVER we trust. It was amazing how close his predictions were to the real results. After listening to the concession speech by Mitt Romney, I went to bed around 1:30 PM. I listened to the fantastic acceptance speech by President Obama only later. The reason I had to go to bed was that I needed to leave home by 3:30 AM to catch my flight to Denver, so I can get there on time to attend a good chunk of the conference. I arrived in Denver to 70 degree weather, while leaving the east coast where it was cold and snowy. The electoral college weighted map of the USA (a cartogram where the scaling is based on different criteria, in this case the electoral college votes) from Mark Newman is on your left. For those of us who are election stats junkies, these kinds of representations are real fun.
I enjoyed the conference very well. Connecting with other colleagues and some vendors was very useful, but the presentations were below par, with the exception of the general sessions. While talking to the colleagues, I felt very good about the various things we are doing at Wellesley.
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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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We have been traveling a fair amount during the past couple of weeks – once to Chicago to visit my son and then to Charlotte and Greensboro, NC where my wife is participating in a conference. I have been meeting up with a good friend in Charlotte and playing golf. I drove two hours each way twice to play. Yup, it is crazy. Yesterday, after getting up at 5 AM and driving down for a 7:30 AM tee time, I almost began doubting weather.com. As you can see in the picture on the left, at 7:30 AM, this is how the golf course looked and we could hear a distant thunder or two and see lightening. However, as predicted, the storm passed quickly and we ended up playing in 50 deg weather on a soggy course.
After my friend introduced me to his other friends and they ask me what I do, the discussion predictably turned to why Higher Ed costs so much. A few of them, like us, have one or more children in College and it is hard on everyone who has to pay what we all have to pay. Since I know a thing or two about the financials of the institutions I have worked in, I tried to explain how, as a non-profit organization, the Higher Ed institutions have worked extremely hard to reduce the budgets and it is very hard to look for where to cut more. Of course, they don’t buy it. I also pointed to the fact that we all have choices when it comes to where we want to send our children to school based on costs, but we all value education so much that this is one area where we are probably not going to make hard choices or take chances.
This topic of increasing cost of higher education is a hot topic and technology is predicted to be a savior! There are all sorts of futuristic arguments on how technology can help reduce the costs and increase productivity, but specifics are lacking. Frankly, if technology could actually help curb the cost of Higher Ed, with the advances we have seen in the recent past, why has this not happened?
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