When people become fatigued, they stop posting as much, when this happens they either drop out, or lurk. If they lurk you can entice them to participate more by getting new cohorts in; at the same time those cohorts need to be at the same(Ish) levels as the lurkers otherwise it feels like waiting for people to catchup. Some times you will get some really good, original, though provoking blog posts that can spur discussion, but for me, by and large, I haven't felt like looking at those blog posts that deal with last October's Topics.

With this lack of peers posting (a variety of peers most importantly, not the usual suspects) a MOOC can go into a death spiral. For what it's worth, there are some interesting topics near the end of the MOOC but at the same time I see a lack of participation. This means that a MOOC is becoming more and more just another self-paced course, that is done alone, because fewer and fewer people participate.

Thus we come back to a chicken or the egg dilemma. You need some participation to spawn more participation, but how do y get a seed of participation? At the beginning of any MOOC the advertising about the MOOC bring together some usual MOOC suspects (including me) which bring enthusiasm and this enthusiasm brings others on board. Once those initial people move onto other MOOCs, or if they decide that this specific MOOC isn't for them, then you need to have a certain base the maintain the discussion. In MobiMOOC for example our research showed that there was a core group of people that participated throughout the MOOC, which helped to get others on board. The problem with Change is that the core has departed (or seems to have departed)?

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 about engagement first, and not learning objectives or something to assess. They actually see the assessment/objective first as wrong, and this is where they lose me. As educators we need to start off with a certain goal in mind, once th goal (end state acquisition and/or behaviors are known) we can then decide how we would check for these behaviors. Yea, I am putting assessment in second because it's important to know how we will be assessing what we want out learners to know.

Once we've worked out goals and assessment methodology, we can then move onto content, perhaps not 100% of th content, but a sizable amount that constitutes a core, additional content will be determined after the learners have been determined and they strengths, needs, and interests as determined. You can think of several possible scenarios while developing these materiala. Learner engagement comes in at the end once you know who your learners are.

I am getting a vibe here that these folks are overreacting to poor implementation of a good method, and to unresponsive teaching. Just because the water is dirty, you don't throw out the baby with the bath water. Engagement is a very important factor in education, but it is not ncessarily the starting point, at least not in classrooms of 15+ students. It may, however, be interesting from a tutor or homeschool perspective where you've got one on one time, and usually loads of it.

The Essence of Connected Learning from DML Research Hub on Vimeo.

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 on the curriculum, a memorize and regurgitate model, rather than looking forward toward a synthesis of existing information (gained through coursework) that leads to new knowledge.

From my own experiences, I had to take comprehensive exams for one of my masters degrees (Applied Linguistics) and the buildup toward those comprehensive exams was nerve-wracking because the comps were like the academic boogey man. Everyone (students) in the program, who had not done comps before, was feeding the fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD) of every other student who had their own FUD. People who took the comps were more easy going about the comps. The main thing that really scared everyone was that

1. We hadn't done written comps before so we didn't know what was required of us
2. We only had 2 chances to pass the exam, so if we didn't those 30-credits, in the end, meant a lot of wasted time and potentially money, since you wouldn't be receiving a degree if you didn't pass.

In the end, the great majority pass on the first try, and even those who don't pass on the second try - since they receive coaching and mentorship from the faculty if they don't pass the first time. I passed as well, with a high pass, something that surprised me given my anxiety over the exams. Our comps didn't focus on regurgitation, but rather on information synthesis. We were given broad statements and we were asked to explicate and take a stand, based on the literature that we had come across. Some of the questions were modified or expanded versions of what we had done in class, so it wasn't completely out of the blue.

Going back to the author, I do agree that written, or oral for that matter (even though I haven't done oral exams), comprehensive exams, even those that I took, focus on the quick-wittedness of the student. How are they able to perform under pressure, and with questions that they potentially haven't seen before. While it is true that in a real world environment those questions do come up, and you do have to take an initial stand on them, you often have the ability to take a break from the debate or conversation and look things up, or come back to issues later on. It is infrequent that people are asked for a major decision, or in-depth explication on the spot.

Perhaps a better assessment of a student's prior learning, and their ability to synthesize information, lies with some sort of Qualifying Paper (or series of Qualifying papers), where they take what they've done in class, they take their own individual readings, and put forth a series of papers that are of publishable quality. It might even be a bonus if these papers tie into the dissertation process (for PhD students anyway) so that they QP work ties into what they are doing, they are demonstrating that they could be successful in the dissertation stage, and they have some work on their dissertation done already before they are officialy a PhD Candidate (not to mention that they come out of the experience with a couple of papers published, or nearly published, which is important in that line of work).

I am wondering what others think about comprehensive exams in general. Like? Dislike? Love-Hate? :-)