I came across an article on Campus Technology last week titled 7 Tips for Listing MOOCs on Your Résumé, and it was citing a CEO of an employer/employee matchmaking firm.  One piece of advice says to create a new section for MOOCs taken to list them there. This is not all that controversial since I do the same.  Not on my resume, but rather on my extended CV (which I don't share anyone),

OK, I am almost 'caught up' with the stuff I missed while I was on vacation (at least as far as 806 goes).  I remember receiving an email from Pearl indicating that Sir John Daniel would be presenting. Too bad the internet wasn't that reliable :-/  Oh well, thank goodness for recordings ;-)Sir John Daniel seemed like a pretty interesting  person, and very knowledgeable (with over 300

A number of threads converged last week for me, and all of the threads exist in a continuum.  The first thread was one that began in the class that I am teaching this summer, INSDSG 601: Foundations of Instructional Design & Learning Technology. One of the things that we circle back to as a class (every couple of weeks) are the notions of instructor and designer.  Where does one end and

Here is the recording of the live session I was in where Matt Crosslin talked about the dual layer MOOC design.  I still question the notion of assessments in MOOCs :-)

The other day I came across this PhD Comics strip on grading rubrics. As a trained instructional designer (and having worked with instructional designers on and off since I started university as an undergraduate student) the concept of rubrics has really stuck with me.  That said,  I generally struggle with rubrics.In theory they are brilliant - a way to objectively measure how well someone

The other day I was reading a blog posted by Rebecca on marking and getting a sense of that impostor syndrome creeping in. I love reading posts like these because I still consider myself new to the teaching, even though I've been doing it for a couple of years now.  Some of the things that she describes are things that I have thought or experienced, and some are not.In terms of an impostor

In my quest to catch up on Pocket - before the news becomes stale, I came across this post by cogdog on seeking the evidence behind digital badges.The anatomy of the Open Badge include the possibility of including links to evidence for the skill that you are being badged for.    Of course, just because there is an associated metadata field available for people to use,  it doesn't mean

The more I read chapter in Macro-Level Learning through Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs): Strategies and Predictions for the Future, the more I am starting to feel like Anton Ego from the animated movie Ratatouille ;-)  It's not that I am aiming to write harsh reviews of the stuff I read, but I kind of feel like the anticipation I have for reading some published things about MOOCs just

The other day I came across a post on ProfHacker written by Maha B. where she talked a bit about her own teaching experiences and whether one assesses the process of learning or the product of learning.  I was thinking about this question in light of my own experiences as a learner, as a designer, and as an instructor who now has had experiences in introductory courses, capstone courses, and intermediate

The other day, while catching up on my (ever growing) pocket reading list, I came across a post from, friend and fellow MobiMOOC colleague, Inge on MOOCs.  It was a rather on-the-nose post about MOOCs, learning, assessment, and the discourse used in MOOCs about learners. Concurrently I am working with a Rhizo team on a social network analysis post where the topic of 'completion' came up, and

This past week the web was abuzz with new research to come out of Harvard and MIT on cheating identification in MOOCs, specifically xMOOCs hosted on the edX platform, but I suspect that any platform that collects appropriate analytics could see this used.  The title of the paper is Detecting and Preventing "Multiple-Account" Cheating in Massive Open Online Courses and it's an interesting read.

I know... I know... This is perhaps a tricky question to answer, but bear with me here, Perhaps the answer to this question of "how do we measure learning" is "well, d'uh! with some sort of test or assessment".  This might be true in one-off training, you visibly see employees either performing or not performing, but when it comes to a higher education context what does it mean to have been badged,

I am finally catching up with my Pocket reading list, again!  This seems to be a fool's errand since it just keeps filling up again with interesting things to read and ponder ;-).  In any case, Rebecca recently was pondering on her blog if Collaborative Autoethnography (CAE) is an appropriate method for a dissertation.  Rebecca, as far as I know, is currently ABD and looking at wrapping

Image from Flickriver, Brian HillegasA few days ago, and totally by stroke of chance, I happened upon a twitter discussion between @HybridPed,  @otterscotter, @actualham, and a few others.  I am not sure what the original topic was but I came in when they were discussing assessment. Do we assess learning or competency? Some regarded learning as transcending competency and some saw competency

It seems like the cosmos is back on another round on beating down on the venerable dissertation as final exercise for a doctoral degree. Stephen Downes posted yesterday this article from Times Higher Education which is asking the question as to whether or not the Doctoral Dissertation is obsolete.† The article quotes Jeremy Farrar of Imperial College London:“An awful lot is going unused and unread,”

I wrote (a few days ago) that I am re-designing  an introductory course in instructional design (see syllabus here).  In my assessment activities I've decided to go with a pass/not pass model.  There will still be something approximating traditional rubrics and categories for different things that learners need to address in each activity, but I am toying with the idea of doing away

A few things happened this week which seemed to point to a nexus on grading, grades, and a throwback to Week 3 of Rhizo15 on what counts. The three thing that came together for me were Whitney's post from Week 3, My own grades from EDDE 802, and me designing (or rather re-designing) the introductory course in instructional design which I will teach/facilitate/rhizolead this summer.  All these

One of the things that has been keeping me busy this semester has been my inaugural semester as a Doctoral student at Athabasca University's Center for Distance Education.  The semester isn't over yet,but I am slowly working at hammering out some assignments for the course.  I've tried to be pro-active so that I can get the foundational reading done early in the semester so I can focus on

My own doctoral journey may have just started, but it's been a meandering path to even get to the start.  It's not the destination after all that matters but the journey. Eventually all doctoral journeys culminate in a dissertation.  For the longest period of time this type of writing was a bit intimidating.  After all, who's got the energy to sit down and write a document that's 100

Wow, it's not even Wednesday noon (half-way through week 1 of module 1) in Connected Courses and the feed is buzzing with the title (and/or #whyiteach).  Quite interesting.  Lots of things saved to pocket.  I will most likely read through them this weekend ;-)  In any case, I joked on twitter earlier that I should write a post on why I don't teach (who knows, this post may evolve

I guess is teaching preparation time!  These past few weekends I've been going through my online course, updating due dates for assignments, and slowly starting to make the changed to the various modules that I had scribbled down as the course was in progress last spring.  It's still up in the air as to whether or not the class will run so I am thinking of applying for an assistantship for

Alright, #MassiveTeaching (or under its official name: "Teaching Goes Massive: New Skills Need") on Coursera is over, that's all he wrote (and then deleted, and someone else recovered). All joking aside, I decided to participate in the final assignment/test of the course which ultimately turned out to be a Level 1 evaluation. I've included the three questions in my previous blog post about this.

Last week was the last formal week of #rhizo14.  Even though we crazy lunatics have taken over Dave's P2PU course site and are continuing the course on our own (for now), life goes on and other MOOCs start and finish.  This week was the week I completed the Introduction to Communication Science from the University of Amsterdam, and the course Diseño, Organización y Evaluación de videojuegos

NOTE: this is a report of the post I wrote for Sloan-C back in November of 2013.  I am reposting here as a backup.  The original can be found here http://blog.sloanconsortium.org/2013/11/18/mooc-evaluation-beyond-the-certificate-of-completion/ This coming January will be my third year of involvement in MOOCs. Questions have come up in the last year around the issue of why students “drop

Angry Spock (Star Trek reboot)OK, OK... the title was easy pickings but this article is quite serious.  I've chosen to ignore, for the most part, the whole idiocy of the term SPOC (small private online course).  SPOCs are really just "regular" online courses, as I've written in my one other post about SPOCs. It bothers me that there is so much revisionist history around the topic of "traditional"

With three MOOCs done (only undertaking one now), I have a little more time to go through and read what has been piling up in my Pocket account.  Now, over the past couple of years there have been a number of articles on building your own MOOC, from a variety of people.  Some in publications like Learning Solutions Magazine, some in eBook form, some in in Blog form.One of the blog-form posts

Happy Labor Day everyone!The other day I was going through my two Learning Solutions Magazine articles to see if there were any comments (Part 1 and Part 2 here) that I might be able to address.  I think it's great when people engage with the reading material on the web in a constructive way, it helps everyone expand their knowledge a little. That said, the comments weren't that many, and they

The other day, through some source I came across this "4 downsides of MOOCs" from LearnDash. I should have known better than to read a vendor's blog, but then again sometimes they surprise me.  Anyway, the blog post seemed like link-bait because the downsides of MOOCs do not really seem that thought out. They are more reactionary than a deep pondering if the medium. So, here are my 2c on the issues

In a few days I will be leaving on vacation, so I won't be MOOCing...or at least I won't be MOOing.  I have downloaded textual materials on my iPad, and I plan on getting a local SIM where I go to keep up with my RSS feeds (until Google Reader decides to kick the bucket).  I thought it would be a good idea to write a few thoughts while I have a hardware keyboard in hand.First up, edX and

I was looking over edX for a course that I could take out of interest, but also something that I could use to evaluate the pedagogy employed, as well as the platform (LMS) itself.I came across the Ancient Greek Hero, and since I never really did any classics in college, and the last time I read the Iliad was in 7th grade when I was in Greece, I thought that this would be a good chance to kill

I got an email the other day that I was awarded a badge on OLDSMOOC (one of the peer reviewed badges), which prompted me to go into Cloudworks to see if there were any more peers that needed evaluating.  I had already completed one peer review (see here for the first one) so why not complete a second one?It turns out that Itana Gimenes had submitted all her materials for the Learning Designer

Today is a new day, and a new topic in OLDSMOOC.  Well, not so much a topic as a winding down on the learning process that has been occurring in this MOOC. On the topic of evaluation, there was an interesting discussion on the Google Group: is it the life blood of learning design or the bane of our existence?My, short, response was as follows:I think that there is a happy medium between the two.

It's week 7 in OLDSMOOC, and as we are windowing down we are tackling the topic of Evaluation. I will be switching tracks again, from the Blended Mobile Learning course (that I've been working on for a while), and going back to the idea of offering the course as a cMOOC. Going through OLDSMOOC I've gotten some good ideas about how to implement my own cMOOC.  I've been thinking a lot about the

This was shared as part of OLDSMOOC, but I thought it would be a good resource for any beginning instructional designer :-) Week 7 term_review from Thomas Reeves

OK, s, I (re)discovered that there are some crowd-sourced badges. I knew this in the first week of the course, but somewhere along the lines I forgot about them (probably because I wasn't planning on applying for those badges anyway ;-)  )In any case, if you are participating in OLDSMOOC, do have a look at the badge application page, and help out a fellow oldsmoocer!  I'm doing my part

Up until yesterday I was in the course "Think Again: How to Reason and Argue" on coursera. I decided to drop the course (more on this in a subsequent post), but my decision to drop the course was partly based on my free time to devote to this course, and the assessment factors currently available for math and science (and logic is a Math course for me ;-)  ). I was conversing with one of my colleagues

Happy New Year to all!2012 was, as most people might argue, the year of the MOOC.  While the xMOOC (coursera, udaciy, edX, and Canvas Network) enjoyed most of the limelight, some traditional MOOCs (cMOOC) have also gotten some notice with the publication of research articles. One of the things that really took me by surprise was the massive amount of coverage that MOOCs got from everywhere! It

**sigh**The mobile client ate my post! I will try to reconstitute as much of it as I remember ;-)In this blog post I am continuing the train of though started by thinking about different levels of participation, and my blog post on MOOC registration.  Since MOOCs are generally not taken for credit, and since they generally don't need to conform to some sort of departmental outcomes standard (i.e.

It seems like Rebecca and I were on the same wavelength yesterday when we were composing our blog posts and reflecting on various aspects of MOOCs.  Rebecca wonders why there is only one level of participation in xMOOCs, and I have to say, having started my 3rd coursera MOOC yesterday (same one as Rebecca, the Design: Creation of Artifacts in Society on coursera), I can see that (from my limited

The topic of open assessment came up during #blendkit2012 this week, which is quite a fascinating topic. Britt asked if peer review can work in small groups, having seen it in xMOOCs like coursera.I've written about open assessment before, but not specifically about this, I don't think. I have written some quick thoughts on the coursera peer review system which can be summarized even quicker by saying

We are now in Week 4 (of 5!) of BlendKit2012 and the subject of the week is content and assessments. The questions to ponder for this week are as follows:In what experiences (direct or vicarious) will you have students participate during your blended learning course?  In what ways do you see these experiences as part of the assessment process? Which experiences will result in student work that

 It's week 3 of 5 in BlendKit2012, and this week's readings are on the topic of assessment (a pretty important topic if you ask me!). Thus far the contributions of my fellow participants have been pretty interesting to read as well (keep it up! :-)  ). In any case, this week's readings give the reader a quick overview of the testing types that an online environment affords, talks (briefly)

Well, my first xMOOC is now complete! For this first time around in my xMOOC explorations I chose a coursera course on Gamification.  This was a good choice because the video lectures were engaging! It turns out that the instructor has a law degree, so I guess his great presentation skills are now easily explained ;-)There were a few highlights and a few dim-lights to the course.  As far

This week on #ioe12 I tackled Open Assessment. Now, I am no newbie to badges. I can't say I've been there "since day 1," but it was pretty darned close!  Before going through these materials, which included a a video from the launch of the HASTAC and MacArthur Foundation DML competition, I thought of open assessment as something that dealt with badges for life long learning, and something that

With more than half of #ioe12 done, I decided to tackle the OpenEd Assessment designer badge. You can see my crude attempt at a badge on the right.  The background is taken from David Wiley's stock badges, with an overlay of the Open Access logo (I like the unlocked padlock) on a Syllabus that is on a scroll.  I was going for a Wax Tablet (going with my Greek roots), but I could not find

OK, I am a little behind on yesterday's questions at hand, but I am catching up today.  This one topic a day is a little too much ;-)How might reimagining assessment prompt us to rethink not only our pedagogical processes, but also the law and policy that governs traditional academic environments? I must admit that I am having a hard time with this question. Assessment ought to be driving

Well, MOOCMOOC starts today, and while #change11 was an experiment in the massiveness of a MOOC both in terms of registered users and in terms of length (36 weeks), MOOCMOOC seems to be an experiment in how small a MOOC can be.I heard about the MOOC from the usual suspects, and while I do have my doubts about MOOCMOOC, I signed up (a glutton for punishment? Or curious soul? You decide). The point of

We have now entered week 5 (of 6) of GameMOOC, and I completely forgot to add a quick synopsis of take-aways for the past couple of weeks (time flies!)  So here is a quick synopsis of notable things in these two weeks.Week 3: GamificationWeek 3 was all about gamification. There were a number of interesting discussion thread this week, and one of them (which also produced an interesting

Last week I had a conversation with Lou McGill, a researcher collecting data for the Change11 MOOC. Our conversation was quite interesting and it seemed to be revolving around learner self-awareness and goal setting. I did take th change MOOC survey, but I have no idea what my responses were when I took it - it seems like such a long time ago (I know I have a copy of the responses, I am just too lazy

Yesterday and the day before, the Educause Learning Initiative (ELI) was hosting a spring focus session on learning analytics.  I have to admit that drew me to this talk (in addition to being interested in analytics of course!) was the talk that George Siemens presented at this ELI to kick things off.  The first day was quite productive, but the second day I had too many other commitments to

This week I am taking part in a Quality Matters workshop on Applying the Quality Matters Rubric.  One of the videos that we're given was this pretty funny video on alignment and assessment.I think anyone who is interested in teaching, or anyone who wants to be an instructional designer, should view this first and use it as a mini case to point out what's wrong :-)

I was reading a post on change11 the other day and this video was talked about. The essence of th video is that in education these days we've gone crazy with assessments and we forget about th learner. Fair enough, I believe that this is indeed true in some states and school systems, especially with things like no child left behind. The problem comes in (for me at least) when the people start talking

I was reading an opinion piece on the Chronicle of Higher Education this past week on Comprehensive exams. The article deals mostly with PhD level comprehensive exams, the types of exams that serve as the gatekeeper between the coursework in a PhD program and the dissertation stage. The main thesis of the author, at least what I got out of it, was that comprehensive exams seem to be looking backward

I was reading John's post the other day titled Assessment, Active Learning and Project based learning where he starts off with the question of whether assessment is a part of learning or instructing.  The answer is yes, but it really depends how much relevance you put on assessment and when in the process of learning or instructing you put the emphasis on this assessment.For example,

The other day I was writing about changing the PhD and Jenny wrote an informative reply to my post informing me that in the UK there are actually three types of PhD programs, the ones that I had experience with (though my researching of PhD programs): the "enter with a dissertation topic;" those that have required course components and a dissertation (what I would term "North

Since Week 8 of Change11 has yet to start (materials seem no where to be found) I thought it would be worth going back and commenting on my previous post on MOOC summative evaluations. The question posed by Alan Selig was how to get summative evaluations from MOOC participants when you have dip-in-jump-out model for most MOOCs; I say most because at least the language MOOC I will be

OK, so now I am sort of in catch up mode to respond to some interesting blog posts I've read in the past few days on Change. I was reading a blog post from Brainy smurf on being allergic to measurement where he asks:Why does it even matter how I learned to perform as long as I can do the job well ?!” I think that you're not allergic to assessment (or measurement) but rather you are allergic

I have a feeling that this question falls into the category of "if a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?"... but I will ask the question anyway :-)This question came to me by reading Sheena's comment in my Different Levels of m post a few days ago. Sheena wrote that she was thinking of an SMS based mLearning project, being inspired by text4baby. Having never

I meant to comment on this blog post and the associated news story a while back but I didn't get a chance until now.I think that in the blog post Assessment is confused with Grading based on this comment:It was not his job, as he explained later, to rank their skills for future employers, or train them to be “information transfer machines,” regurgitating facts on demand. Released from the pressure

here's an interesting read by by Ken BuckmanIn recent years,there has been an ocean of ink poured over page upon page concerning the topic of assessment. I’m a philosophy professor in Texas where assessment seems to have its epicenter, so I think I have a unique perspective on the topic. Not only is assessment on the march due to misguided Texas legislative initiatives, not only is the Governor