Image from Flickriver, Brian Hillegas A 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

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

Good ol' Zoidberg asking Why Back when I was an MBA student, probably in a project management class, we were told that we should ask "why" five times in order to come to the root cause of the problem (I wonder why this is why kids seem to keep asking "why" incessantly ;-) ). It thus seems quite a propos that the first formal week (two weeks actually!) of Connected Courses are focused on Why we need

Last year when I put out the call for the Great Big MOOC Book, one of the submissions came from a colleague in Australia who is going to write a bit about MOOC experiments that they ran on the Australian Open2Study platform, which is sponsored by the Open University of Australia.  I had heard of the platform before, but I never really tried it out since I was testing out other platforms

I was reading this article on Slate the other day about Georgia Tech's MOOC based MA in Computer Science which will cost around $6,000 for those interested in taking part in it. Even though Georgia Tech's Online Education MOOC crashed and burned, I am really curious to see this launch and succeed. If this is the program they are thinking of going full MOOC on, I think it may just work. Why do I think

With the gamification almost over (this coming week is the final week), the Human Computer Interaction course on Coursera is just starting! Back in the day (2003-ish) I was finishing off my undergraduate degree in computer science and one of my final courses was a graduate course on User Interface Design, which I really enjoyed! I liked the subject matter, and the course was taught by a professor that

I was reading this on Slashdot the other day about a person going back to school to complete their computer science degree.Here's a quick quote:I recently went back to college to finish my CS degree, however this time I moved to a new school. My previous school taught only C++, except for a few higher level electives (OpenGL). The school I am now attending teaches what seems like every language in

Well OK, not really. I don't know if this story transpired on a Monday - it was just a catchy title :-)Anyway, I had heard of this story about a student accused of copyright infringement and possibly academic dishonesty for posting his own code online! I did not know much of the story until I read the whole story on Inside Higher Ed. If you haven't seen it, go have a quick read - it IS pretty ridiculous.Basically