Is xMOOC a New or a Regressive Pedagogy?

An insightful observation from elearnspace.com by George Siemens (March 10. 2013):

    The “new pedagogical models” (A Silicon Valley term meaning: we didn’t read the literature and still don’t realize that these findings are two, three, or more decades old) being discovered by MOOC providers supports what most academics and experienced teachers know about learning: it’s a social, active, and participatory process.

    The current MOOC providers have adopted a regressive pedagogy: small scale learning chunks reminiscent of the the heady days of cognitivism and military training. Ah, the 1960′s. What a great time to be a learner.

Dr. Siemens' comments confirmed my observation that I thought I was wrong about MOOCs. I have been involving in the creation, design, and development of computer-assisted learning. Lots of our efforts were invested in creating "small scale learning chunks" from the approach of cognitivism. The pedagogical models taken by xMOOC look so familiar to me. Yes, xMOOCs are presented in more optimal and fashioned ways with the engagement of many world leading instructors/institutions and the support of emerging technology. However, the basic model is similar to the one adopted in the old age.

A very important reason that promoted the spread of computer-assisted instruction model between 1960 and mid 90' was that it was an easy-to-scale-up model. The model has proved to be unsatisfactory in terms of personalization - there is no one-size-fit-all education. They are good as complementary learning components but are not appropriate to be considered as full functional courses. Without further improvement, I agree with Dr. Siemens' comment that xMOOCs are adopting a regressive pedagogy.

Some instructors of the courses delivered in Coursera, e.g, Eric Rabkin from U of Michigan in his Fantasy and Science Fiction: The Human Mind, Our Modern World, provided additional video lectures discussing the assignment which had already been marked and returned. Other instructors, e.g., Lada Adamic from U of Michigan in her Social Network Analysis, had provided Google Hand-out discussions which allowed students to raise questions and share experiences.

Without serious reflection on the failure of old games, it would be a waste of education resources which are getting insufficient.

Retrieving LAK13 Data From Canvas

Thanks to Martin Hawksey! I followed his step-by-step recipe and finally was able to output the desired results as shown in Martin's blog.

It's a short article but it took me more than 6 hours to go through it. During the process, I downloaded/installed TagHelper, NodeXL, and SNAPP 2. I also browsed over the tools and their manual. Unfortunately, I was not able to get TagHelper run successfully on my notebook computer (I double clicked on .bat files as instructed by the User Guide but the program was not started as it should be. Can anyone help?)

I have an impression that, currently, learning analytics researchers are more interested in behavioral analysis than content conceptual analysis.

Reflection on Dr. Severance's Presentation

I think I got only the key points of Severance's presentation - IMS: Learning Tools Interoperability (Severance, Feb. 25, 2013).

1. An open protocol for data sharing will save consumers lots of money.
2. LTI (Learning Tools Interoperability) allows LMS to own authentic data such as student ID in local server while saving the non-authentic data in a public server. In this way, the data retrieving becomes independent from LMS and improves the chances for data interoperability. 

If learning analytics want to be applied to multiple learning system - LMS, CMS, social media -, it would be important to have a commonly accepted LTI. However, learning from the experience of SCORM which has been not very successful, IMS LTI might have a long way to go before widely adopted in the field.

Reflection on Dr. Fritz's Presentation

I was especially impressed by the final part of the presentation in which Dr. Fritz (Fritz, Feb. 20, 2012) talked about the benefits of providing learning information to people.

Using Learning Analytics to Scale Peer Feedback as AN Intervention Strategy: How might we learn from others?

1. If you were given chances to do some observation, you learn to distinguish themselves with others, they will try to emulate this and then, try to practice (self-control), and finally become better (self-regulation). ~ Self-regulated learning (Zimmerman).
2. If people were given better choice tools, they would make better choices. If you gave people opportunities to compare themselves with others, more often, they will learn something in a more scalable way. How we design our LMS that allow students and instructors to compare with others?

Reflection on Dr. Whitmer's Presentation

After listening to J. Whitmer's presentation on "Student Achievement: Large Hybrid Courses" (Whitmer, Feb. 19, 2012), I have learned the followings:

1. The findings we can get by comparing students' uses of LMS or characteristics revealed limited information which would improve the teaching. 
2. How, instead of how many times, the students interact with LMS (content, assessment, etc.) is all that matter to students' success in learning. 
3. This presentation demonstrated a good way to present my dissertation during the proposal and the final defense. 

Questions: I was not able to find the presentation slides from Slideshare.net using the URL given at the end of Dr. Whitmer's presentation.

What I have learned in the first week

The first week of LAK13 course is over. Although I tried to catch up with all the reading materials, discussions and self-presences, I was able to engage only part of them. RE: Assigment 1 I think I will take the advice from George's representation and play with the data that I can access with easily. I am thinking to adopt one of the LA tools that I newly learned, e.g. GATE, Gephi