Open edX Conference 2015: Cultivating creativity through projects, peers, passion, play

By Ramón Talavera-Franco
@ratafra

Dr. Mitch Resnick, director of the Lifelong Kindergarten group at the Media Laboratory at MIT was the 2015 Open edX Conference keynote speaker. During his conference, Dr. Resnick argued that schools do not teach children to think creatively to be able to face XXI century demands such as adaptability to new situations, confronting uncertainty, and becoming creative thinkers. In order to cultivate creativity in the learning process, Dr. Resnick designed a 4p's framework that explores how a learner learns from projects, peers, passion, and play.

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:

2014... the year I juggled MOOCs

By Ramón Talavera Franco

@ratafra

I had an intense relationship with MOOCs in 2014. As all intense “relationships”, I loved them, hated them, invested a lot of time on them, or abandon them. MOOCs surprised me with new knowledge (i.e. gamification), or satisfied my pedagogical learning needs (i.e. EdTech and blended learning). I defended MOOCs against those who desperately wanted them to fail based on their high dropout rate, but also, I raised my voice against those MOOCs that experimented with students and neglected their needs.

Throughout 2014, I witnessed the evolution of MOOCs and I confirmed my thesis that MOOCs are just the beginning of an important revolution in e-learning. According to Shah D. (2014) 400+ universities offered over 2400+ MOOCs in 2014. At the beginning, all MOOCs were Massive and Open. At the end of the year, some evolved to be less massive, and less open.

¿Un MOOC para aprender a trapear?

Ramón Talavera Franco

@ratafra

Los MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses por sus siglas en inglés) son cursos en línea diseñados y producidos por las mejores universidades del mundo. Son la nueva revolución educativa por su concepto democratizador de la educación (debatible aún) ya que cualquier persona, no importando su lugar de residencia o su nivel socioeconómico, puede tomar cursos en línea de Harvard, MIT o la Universidad de Berkley en California, que estarían fuera de su alcance de no ser distribuidos en forma de MOOCs.

The learning MOOC perspective

By Ramón Talavera Franco

@ratafra

MIT and Stanford sponsored the “Learning with MOOCs: a practitioner’s workshop” on August 12-13, 2014 in Cambridge, MA. It was not clear for me who could attend to the workshops,  but I think that the event was “for invitation only”. Thankfully, MIT and Stanford transmitted some of the conferences live through webcast. Hence, I could have access to the keynote speaker conference.

It is interesting how the organizers divided the workshops. They used the modality of “tracks” (a 15 minute talk followed by 45 minutes facilitated discussion) to explore MOOC’s teaching, design, research, and technology. The workshop program was very interesting. Check the program here for more information.

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.

Serendipity, MOOCs and Gamification

By Ramón Talavera-Franco
@ratafra

Photo by Artsproject

In a way, a baby girl sited in front of me represented both characters of the short film Sight that I was watching for my gamification MOOC assignment while having a cup of coffee in a restaurant. Sight, the short sci-fi film by May-raz and Daniel Lazo depicts a futuristic world where people have retinal implants that allow them to connect to virtual realities, play games, obtain digital information about other people’s lives, send chat messages, pay bills, and receive points for every success activity. Why am I comparing this baby girl with the characters of the film? Because she belongs to the generation who started using technology at a very early age, and who certainly will contribute to change the world similarly to Sight. The way May-raz and Daniel Lazo predicted the future in their short film, could be compared to how George Orwell predicted our present in 1984.

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:

What is MOOCstream?

Ramón Talavera Franco

@ratafra

English composition1: Achieving Expertise

In 2013, I submitted my application to study the Ed. D. program at Northeastern University. As a Spanish-language speaker who obtained my graduate and undergraduate degrees in my native language, I was concerned about not meeting the academic English writing requirements of a doctoral program. My prior academic writing consisted of two English composition courses taken six years ago. Therefore, I wanted to take an additional writing course before embarking in this new academic adventure.

While browsing the Internet, I found a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) that caught my attention: English Composition I: Achieving Expertise
 (ECIAE). I didn’t know what a MOOC was or what to expect from it, but what struck me was that this course was provided by Duke University with no fees. How could a prestigious university such as Duke offer a free-of-charge course? Well, investigate was hooked. I signed up.