Interview with MoocLab.club's CEO Carolyn McIntyre

Ramón Talavera Franco
@Ratafra

MoocLab.club is a Forum and Community Website for Consumers and Providers of MOOCs and Online Learning to meet, share, debate and learn. The site aims to provide its users with a centralised space to interact with peers around a common theme: E-learning. Through the forums, you can ask for or give advice, debate on topical issues, find or add relevant information and keep up to date with news and insights relating to MOOCs and Online Learning.

Watch this three minutes picks from the interview

MoocLab from Ramon Talavera on Vimeo.

1. How (did you/somebody else) come up with the idea to create MoocLab?
My brother is Charles McIntyre, CEO & Co-Founder of IBIS Capital, a company that provides a range of asset management and investment banking services dedicated to the media sector, & Co-Founder of EdTech Europe, Europe's Leading EdTech Conference Platform which hosts an annual EdTech summit. With his deepening involvement in the EdTech field, Charles approached me to ask if I’d be interested in developing a website focussed on e-Learning.

MOOCs certifications are going cuckoo?

By Ramón Talavera Franco

@ratafra

When MOOCs started the only certification users received was a certificate of participation. Probably the low completion rate of the thousand of students registered in a MOOC encouraged MOOC providers to issue a more valued credential to motivate people to finish the courses. Hence, they started to issue certificates of completion, and shortly after, MOOC providers decided to create stronger certifications focused on the needs of the job market. Some examples are:

1) Nanodegrees from Udacity. In one of my previous blogs, I explained:

Loving and hating a MOOC. MITx 11.132x Design and Development of Educational Technology

By Ramón Talavera Franco
@ratafra

To read week 1 click here To read week 2 click here To read week 3 click here To read week 4 click here

Registering for a MOOC while working full time and being a part time Ed.D. student is challenging. Complying with its pedagogical components (videos, readings, assignments), and participating in its forums, groups, hangouts, etc., is a major task, especially, when the course is designed using the same concept of a course taught at a university level. The huge difference between them both is that a course taken at a university offers credits towards a degree while MOOCs do not offer those credits. Hence, if MOOCs pedagogical and assessment demands are similar to college courses, shouldn’t students receive recognition according to those demands?

First open edX conference… a blast!

By Ramón Talavera Franco
@ratafra

http://con.openedx.org/

The first open edX conference brought together over 200 education specialist from all over the world to share ideas about the use of the edX open source platform. For two days, we examined possible solutions to issues addressed to the implementation of edX platform as well as pedagogical and best practice approaches—such as the importance of transforming the MOOC certification paradigm. Breakout sessions and keynote speakers were impactful. However, the best part of the conference was the opportunity to get to know the people who are “behind the scenes”. These are the people who came from different places of the world to share creativity, knowledge, problem-solving skills, and enthusiasm in order to make a better MOOC world.

Nanodegree to level up your career!

By Ramón Talavera-Franco

 @ratafra 

Nanodegree is a new job-focused credential that Udacity––in partnership with AT&T––will offer starting fall 2014. The first nanodegrees are focused on gaining entry-level software skills. The courses will be completed in 6-12 months and it is expected that students invest 10 hours per week. The cost is $200.00 US per month; however, AT&T is offering scholarships to non-profit organizations such as Genesys Works and Year up. In addition, AT&T will offer 100 paid internships to top students who complete a nanodegree. So… do you want to level up your career?

Sebastian Thurn, a research professor at Stanford University, and Udacity co-founder & CEO, explained that nanodegrees are the solution for those who

Facial Biometrics: A Solution or a Problem for MOOCs Assessments?

By Ramón Talavera-Franco

@ratafra

Photo author Mounirzok

I just registered in the Performance and Assessment in the Virtual Classroom Massive Open Online Course (MOOC). This is one of the four courses offered in the Virtual Teaching Program designed by the University of California, Irvine/ Extension through Coursera. This is the sixth MOOC that I have taken so far. It differs from others in two aspects: 1) the course requires that participants who pursue a Specialization Certificate register through a facial biometric system, 2) the cost of the course is 39 dollars. Since both aspects are controversial, I’m going to concentrate only in the facial biometrics feature, leaving the cost issue for a future post.

5 MOOCs e-Pedagogy models, and 7c’s Learning Design framework

By Ramón Talavera-Franco
@ratafra

I would like to share with you two main lessons learned from The pedagogy of MOOCs webinar presented by Terese Bird and Gráinne Conole, from the University of Leicester, during the Open Education Week 2014:

1. Differences between Open Educational Resources (OER) and Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs).
2.  MOOC’s pedagogical perspective.

After listening to the webinar and conducting some research, my understanding of OER and MOOCs is: