Building ESL Assertiveness from a MOOC: English Composition I: Achieving Expertise

Hello,

I just wanted to share with you that my first academic MOOC article was published in The MOOC Case Book. The article Building ESL Assertiveness from a MOOC: English Composition I: Achieving Expertise talks about my own experience as ESL taking the English Composition 1 MOOC from Duke University. This MOOC opened up the window to the possibility to reach academic knowledge for free, and more importantly, it helped me to get assertiveness in my writing skills. It's been two years since I took the English Composition 1 MOOC. The fact that I could write a case study about my own experience means a lot to me. I hope that other ESLs feel motivated by this story.

Many other accomplishments came after that course: I started my Ed.D., and I'm publishing a blog about MOOCs. I still hesitate when I write in English, but I'm convinced that I will surpass those insecurities as I face the blank page every day.

Building ESL Assertiveness from a MOOC: 

English Composition I:Achieving Expertise.

Ramón Talavera-Franco, 

Ed.D. Student at Northeastern University, USA

En México educación gratuita de alto nivel a través de MOOCs. ¿Qué es eso?

Por Ramón Talavera-Franco

@ratafra

Cualquier adulto quien vive y trabaja en la ciudad de México sabe lo difícil que es tener acceso a educación de calidad. No porque no exista, sino porque no hay tiempo o dinero para acceder a ella. Los bajos salarios, las jornadas laborales de más de 8 horas, las distancias para ir de la casa al trabajo y viceversa, y el tráfico, son algunos factores que impiden a un adulto poder continuar sus estudios de bachillerato, universidad o posgrado.

La educación en línea se ha convertido en una opción.

Actualmente cualquier adulto puede estudiar bachillerato o universidad a través de programas educativos tanto

Educating 1 billion students in 10 years: Open edX Conference 2015

Ramón Talavera-Franco

@ratafra

Anant Agarwal, CEO of edX was clear about the goal of the organization: Educating 1 billion students in the next 10 years. By 2015, Open edX—a non-profit organization established in Boston, MA—has reached 5 million students from more than 196 countries. The organization partners with 90 educational institutions in 40 countries, and offers 700+ courses online. According to these numbers, reaching the 1 billion students goal

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.

How MOOCs help Obama's TechHire Initiative

By Ramón Talavera-Franco

ratafra

I would like to share a short video that I produced about Obama's TechHire Initiative. The video is a call to action to the Latino Limited Language English Proficient (LEP) community to take advantage of this Initiative. The TechHire initiative is designed to recruit and place applicants by creating more fast track tech training opportunities. I think that TechHire Initiative might empower the Latino LEP community by helping them get the skills required to be competitive in a global economy.

The video is self-explanatory. Please share it with all Latino organizations that might benefit from this Initiative.

How MOOCs led me to Harvard

Ramón Talavera Franco

@ratafra

In a way, MOOCs have led me to Harvard. A few days ago, I presented the first draft of a game designed for learning Spanish during the 2015 Heritage Language Research Institute sponsored by National Heritage Language Resource Center (NHLRC) and the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), at Harvard University. This Institute “brings together researchers from language sciences and education to focus on fostering new research in heritage language and to promote the heritage language agenda in academia and society at large” (NHLRC, n.d.).

I’m interested in Spanish heritage learners' linguistic variations, syntax, socio-cultural language norms, and pedagogy theories that explore best teaching practices for this particular linguistic group. Therefore, I often attend conferences and symposiums regarding this topic. Harvard hosted the 2015 Heritage Language Research Institute and I decided to go and dive into new learning.

Meetups + MOOCs: Promoting Active Learning and Communities of Practice

Ramón Talavera Franco

@ratafra

edX Boston Community meetups promote active learning and communities of practice since 2014. edX is a Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) provider founded as a non-profit organization by MIT and Harvard. MOOCs are online university-level courses distributed free of charge through edX platform. Due to MOOCs asynchronous attribute students’ participation is limited to online discussion forums. However, the need to connect students face-to-face encouraged edX to use meetup.com to create local discussion groups where students share experiences and learn from each other.

Since MOOC users interests vary, edX administrators are experimenting with different meetup formats that cover those interests. The first format consists in MOOC study groups. Attendants are invited to participate in study groups integrated according to a MOOC subject-matter (computer science, nutrition, biology, entrepreneurship, etc.). Participants join their corresponding MOOC study group and start a conversation by introducing themselves or by exchanging concerns about the MOOC taken. One benefit of these study groups is the possibility to engage in active learning by discussing the topic and learning from the experience of others.

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:

Sri Lanka and MOOCs…will they get along?

Ramón Talavera Franco

@ratafra

Students in Sri Lanka don’t take MOOCs seriously due to a lack of an effective certification system. Sri Lanka has a certificate-oriented education system rather than knowledge-oriented. Master’s degrees and PhD’s are strongly valued. Therefore students look for certifications in whatever academic path they chose.

This is part of my conversation with Dilrukshi Gamage, a Ph.D. in eLearning and HCI student, at the University of Moratuwa, who I met during the MOOC Design and Development of Educational Technology provided by the edX platform. Our common interest in eLearning and the fact that we both are pursuing a doctoral degree helped keep our communication alive after the course was ended, and now we are frequently in contact via different social media software.

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.

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.

Communities of Practice. Week 4 of MITx 11.132x Design and Development of Educational Technology MOOC

Ramón Talavera-Franco

@ratafra

To read week 1 post click here      To read week 2 post click here      To read week 3 post click here      To read weeks 5 & 6 click here

During the fourth week of this course, over 60 students met in an unhangout to share notes about our final project in particular, and about the course in general. Unhangout is an open source platform for running large scales conferences online. We all met in a “lobby” where we had the opportunity to exchange “hello” notes or ask questions about the unhangout. Clearly, unhangouts were a new tool for the most of us to use, so we didn’t know what to expect from it. Professor Kofler welcomed us via a stream life video and explained the mechanics of the unhangout. Then, we met in one of the 10 (or more?) breakout sessions for up to six people per room, and we received three questions to discuss among us. Answering the questions was not mandatory, but they certainly helped to break the ice and find a starting point for a conversation.

Active learning. Week 3 of MITx 11.132x Design and Development of Educational Technology MOOC

By Ramón Talavera Franco

@ratafra

To read week 1 click here      To read week 2 click here      To read week 4 click here      To read weeks 5 and 6 click here

So far we have explored some educational terminology along the course: constructivism, constructionism, deep learning, and active learning, and our assignments, course activities and intervention in the forums are designed to explore such terminology. To do so, this week we’ve had the opportunity to learn from diverse educational software such as Geniverse, StarLogo Nova, and other simulation platforms that either are included in the course by professor Klopfer or are being added by our peers in the course wikki organized by topics. So far, students have submitted over 30 simulation platforms links that open vast opportunities to practice the main topic of the week: active learning.

Does grade matter? Second week of MITx: 11.132x Design and Development of Educational Technology MOOC

Ramón Talavera-Franco
Ratafra

To read week 1 click here      To read week 3 click here      To read week 4 click here      To read week 5 and 6 click here

This week I’ve been kind of disappointed after submitting my assignment to11.132x Design and Development of Educational Technology MOOC because I haven’t received any comment on it. Are assignments important in MOOCs or not?

All of us who have taken MOOCs know the different facts that are involved in submitting an assignment: time invested, research, complying with due dates, and even managing stress. What happens when our assignments are not peer reviewed, or graded?

Everything old is new again… First week of 11.132x Design and Development of Educational Technology MOOC.

Ramón Talavera Franco
@ratafra

To read week 2 click here.      To read week 3 click here      To read week 4 click here      To read week 5 & 6 click here

Over the next few weeks, I’ll share my experience as a student registered in11.132x Design and Development of Educational Technology MOOC. Designed and taught by Professor Eric Klopfer from MIT, this MOOC discusses the relationship between educational theory and technology. The reason that I’m taking this course is due to my interest in Ed Tech, and my ongoing analysis on MOOCs instructional design and pedagogical approaches. Also, because I’m a doctor of education student at Northeastern University and my doctoral program does not offer a course related to this subject. Hence, this MOOC is an excellent opportunity to explore this topic.

¿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.

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