Professional Development Through MOOCs

So it's the start of another semester and many of us are neck-deep in syllabi, new students, and recovering from winter break.  But for those that might be looking for something to stimulate and get them thinking about their work as an educator, we've assembled this collection of MOOCs that are starting up in the next week or two for you to consider signing up.

There's a great variety of them out there that can help enhance your day to day work or the bigger projects and goals in your professional life.  These were selected largely for their relevance to higher education, but we encourage you to check out some of the different MOOCs that are out there and let us know what you find! 

Academic Integrity: Values, Skills, Action

• Starts February 1, 2016
• 4 Weeks
• 4 hours/week 
• https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/academic-integrity

American Education Reform: History, Policy, Practice

• Starts January 25, 2016
• 8 weeks of study
• 6-8 hours/week 
• https://www.coursera.org/course/edref

Bringing STEM to Light - Teaching about Light and Optics

• Starts January 25, 2016
• 5 Weeks
• 2 hours/week 
• https://www.canvas.net/browse/laserclassroom/courses/light-and-optics-1

Childhood in the Digital Age

• Starts February 1, 2016
• 4 Weeks
• 3 hours/week 
• https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/childhood-in-the-digital-age

Coaching Digital Learning - Cultivating a Culture of Change

• Starts February 15, 2016
• 6 Weeks
• 2-3 hours/week 
• https://place.fi.ncsu.edu/course/view.php?id=34

Disciplinary Literacy for Deeper Learning

• Starts February 1, 2016
• 6 Weeks
• 2-3 hours/week 
• https://place.fi.ncsu.edu/course/view.php?id=30

Foundations of Teaching for Learning 1: Introduction

• Starts January 25, 2016
• 4 weeks of study
• 3-4 hours/week 
• https://www.coursera.org/learn/teaching

Foundations of Teaching for Learning 2: Being a Teacher

• Starts January 25, 2016
• 6 weeks of study
• 3-4 hours/week
• https://www.coursera.org/learn/being-a-teacher

Foundations of Teaching for Learning 3: Learners and Learning

• Starts January 25, 2016
• 6 weeks of study
• 3-4 hours/week
• https://www.coursera.org/learn/teaching-learning

Foundations of Teaching for Learning 4: Curriculum

• Starts January 25, 2016
• 6 weeks of study
• 3-4 hours/week
• https://www.coursera.org/learn/teacher-curriculum

Foundations of Teaching for Learning 5: Planning for Teaching and Learning

• Starts January 25, 2016
• 6 weeks of study
• 4-6 hours/week
• https://www.coursera.org/learn/teaching-plan

Foundations of Teaching for Learning 6: Introduction to Student Assessment

• Starts January 25, 2016
• 6 weeks of study
• 4-6 hours/week
• https://www.coursera.org/learn/learning-assessment

Foundations of Teaching for Learning 7: Being a Professional

• Starts January 25, 2016
• 6 weeks of study
• 4-6 hours/week
• https://www.coursera.org/learn/professional-teacher

Foundations of Teaching for Learning 8: Developing Relationships

• Starts January 25, 2016
• 6 weeks of study
• 4-6 hours/week
• https://www.coursera.org/learn/teacher-relationships

Learning through ePortfolios

• Starts January 25, 2016
• 8 weeks of study
• 16 hours total
• https://www.canvas.net/browse/empirestate/courses/learning-through-eportfolios

Professional Web Accessibility Auditing Made Easy

• Starts January 25, 2016
• 4 weeks of study
• 5-8 hours/week
• https://www.canvas.net/browse/ryersonu/courses/web-access-auditing

Storytelling for Change

• Starts January 26, 2016
• 6 Weeks
• 3-4 hours/week
• https://novoed.com/storytelling-change-2016-1

Teaching Adults: For new (and newish) Teachers

• Starts January 25, 2016
• 6 weeks of study
• 2-4 hours/week
• https://www.canvas.net/browse/rentontechnicalcollege/courses/teaching-adults

Teaching Literacy Through Film

• Starts January 25, 2016
• 4 weeks of study
• 3 hours/week
• https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/teaching-literacy-through-film

Teaching Statistics Through Data Investigations

• Starts February 1, 2016
• 8 Weeks
• 3-4 hours/week
• https://place.fi.ncsu.edu/course/view.php?id=33

What MOOCs have you tried?  What has been your experience?

MOOCS and Beyond: My Experience

Well, I have to admit the MOOC course wasa worthwhile endeavor.  While I participated in many of the activities, I did not complete the course.

It was a great way to learn about the subject matter (“Exploring Irish Identity”). I was able to experience various aspects of Irish Identity, including: History, Literature, Film, GAA, Art, Music, etc.

Offering free courses via the MOOC format is an opportunity to broaden your knowledge at no financial cost to you. The only thing you will spend is your time.  You can check out the range of MOOCs available across the Internet at the MOOC List website.

The course ran for 8 weeks and began about 5 weeks before my trip.  What I found is that before I took my trip to Ireland, I was dedicated to completing the course.  I would log in when I could, listen to the lectures, complete the discussion boards and do the quizzes.  While some days I wouldn’t be able to do the necessary assignments I would make sure to catch up when I did have the time. Through this, I learned a great deal about Ireland and its Identity.  However, once I was in Ireland I did not have access to WiFi and couldn’t get online. Many of the things I learned about in the course made me have a better experience.  I heard about the great many literary figures from Ireland and was able to see where some were born.  I heard wonderful Irish music and appreciated where some of it originated. I would see the GAA advertised in the different pubs and know what it was all about. I saw where the great Irish song, “Danny Boy” was written. 

Once I returned from the trip, my interest dimmed though.  I found the desire to complete the course was not there.  What I have determined was that a MOOC course is very beneficial as long as you have the time and desire to learn the subject matter.

Go ahead, find one that interests you and go for it!!

MOOC, MOOC, and more MOOC

I guess that is the buzz lately. What is a MOOC and what is it all about and is it a worthwhile endeavor?

According to Wikipedia: "A massive open online course (MOOC) is an online course aimed at large-scale interactive participation and open access via the web. In addition to traditional course materials such as videos, readings, and problem sets, MOOCs provide interactive user forums that help build a community for the students, professors, and TAs. MOOCs are a recent development in distance education.

I have been hearing about MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) a lot lately.  There seem to be pros and cons and I wanted to find out more about it.

What a coincidence to see that Hibernian College in Dublin was offering a MOOC course in “Exploring Irish Identity”.  It just so happened that I visited Ireland in July and to explore my Irish Identity.  It seems like destiny!

I joined the course and found it amazing when I saw where the enrolled students were from.  It was truly a massive course with countries like Tanzania, Netherlands, Canada and Belgium represented, just to name a few.  I look forward to reporting back on my experience.  But it's great to see that there are such a variety of MOOCs out there to learn just about anything. 

Have you tried a MOOC?  What was the subject?  What was the experience?  

Massive Open Online Courses: Massive Threat or Open Invitation? Part 2 of 2

This 2-part blog feature comes from Guest Blogger, Michael J. Badolato, Ed.D., Dean of Academic Technology and was originally featured in NSCC Technology Across the Curriculum's annual publication:  Mousetales.  Part 1 of this article can be found here.

In the course of this academic year, two Massachusetts state community colleges have partnered with edX in the delivery of an introductory computer science course on their respective campuses. Mass Bay and Bunker Hill each have integrated edX’s content within different instructional designs. Mass Bay has developed a hybrid, or blended, design incorporating the MOOC as the online component complementing weekly in-class meetings to meet the course’s total credit-hour requirement. Bunker Hill’s rendition is essentially a ‘flipped classroom’ model where the lecture provided by the MOOC is positioned as the assignment component along with a full number of in-class meetings reserved for project-based activities, collaboration and discussion. While MIT will recognize participation with a certificate of completion, course credit will be awarded through the participating community colleges.  The courses are led by the local community college professors while the MOOC portion of the course is a video lecture offering no real interaction with the MIT lecturer. In effect, both schools implement the MOOC as a large-scale reusable learning object in the service of their individual learning outcomes.

What is important to remember about this partnership is that while MIT and Harvard have elite brand recognition, they are relative novices in the world of online learning. Community colleges have the benefit of years of experience in online course design and in accommodating students diverse in their backgrounds and educational goals. Where the community colleges gain yet another strategy in their arsenal, Harvard and MIT gain valuable partners who can share their extensive knowledge of creating challenging learning experiences that benefit students of all levels.

To gain a balanced perspective on MOOCS, it is helpful to view them within the context of an emerging academic infrastructure where both content and process is less centralized and more distributed. This infrastructure embraces sources of content beyond our local development, includes individuals outside of our immediate locale, blends the physical and virtual, and rebalances the teacher-student-peer relationship towards independent learning and collaboration. Aside from MOOCs and open content, a working example can be found in our own Math Redesign Project, which is a flexible convergence model utilizing third-party content within a fixed learning environment facilitated by qualified, experienced faculty.  We have before us a greater continuum of possibilities that will continue to include us and the value we provide, yet challenge us to collaborate and literally think outside the boxes that are our texts, curriculum, classrooms, desks, buildings, and servers.  As the continuum expands, we will in-turn find ourselves moving beyond the writing of singular courses toward strategically building complete learning experiences.  The possibilities have never been greater.

To learn more, please visit:

• edX: www.edx.org
• Udacity: www.udacity.com
• Coursera: www.coursera.org
• Khan Academy: www.khanacademy.org
• MIT Open Courseware: http://ocw.mit.edu
• Carnegie Mellon Open Learning Initiative: http://oli.cmu.edu
• Open Education Resources Commons: www.oercommons.org

Have you taken a MOOC?  What are some of your experiences with MOOCs?  

Massive Open Online Courses: Massive Threat or Open Invitation? Part 1 of 2

This 2-part blog feature comes from Guest Blogger, Michael J. Badolato, Ed.D., Dean of Academic Technology and was originally featured in NSCC Technology Across the Curriculum's annual publication:  Mousetales.

When I first encountered the word “MOOCs” a little over a year ago, I envisioned subterranean creatures lying in wait to conquer our world, or perhaps another multi-user online dungeon game.  A recent set of articles (see Laura Pappano's “The Year of the MOOC" and Kevin Carey's “Show Me Your Badge") featured on the cover of the November 2012 New York Times Education Life supplement presented a white rabbit along with the headline “Massive and multiplying, the latest word in online learning: MOOC.”  While the latter image may be far less menacing, it is no less compelling given the seemingly sudden appearance and proliferation of MOOCs across the higher education landscape.  

On the surface, MOOCs, or Massive Open Online Courses, are exactly what the term implies: an online course that is massive in terms of sheer enrollment, potentially thousands at any given time, and open, in that anyone can attend regardless of academic background, at no cost and with no official registration required.

Upon closer examination of MOOCs, there is something in them that is familiar in a manner not unlike so many ‘next big things’ we have all encountered.  Yet, their very scale and accessibility suggests implications for altering the structures and relationships of our educational systems as we have come to define them.  It is common experience, if not historical record, that whenever a new technology is first integrated into the educational practice of the day, be it chalkboard or circuit board, some disruption occurs while the innovation gradually settles into the mainstream.   Communities of practice, within a single institution or distributed across the field, establish rubrics, standards, and other structures from which to base development and assess quality.  The innovation is adopted, brought under control and integrated within an agreed upon framework. Final analysis results in acceptance, rejection or revision and the practice moves onward.

In the midst of these processes, technology in education has come to know several forms. Many colleges and universities, NSCC among them, have been developing their online learning practice and capacity for the better part of two decades. Classroom delivery, increasingly influenced by what has been learned through online practice, has also become richer and more complex in its ability to accommodate a greater variety of content and interaction.  The recent influx of mobile and wireless devices promises to take these interactions to a more immediate, untethered and personal level.  Thus, the very infrastructure of our educational delivery system is becoming distributed across an increasing number of channels while pedagogies strive to adapt.  Content for this emerging infrastructure is being prolifically developed as the means for its production and adoption becomes more accessible, less costly and, ironically, less technical.

A recent trend that has been born of these possibilities is the Open Content Movement.  Among the growing number of open content developers and distributers are individual teachers working through collaborative online entities such as the Open Education Resources (OER) Commons, as well as non-profit organizations such as Kahn Academy, a producer of internet video micro-lectures currently in its seventh year of operation. Several renowned institutions have also sponsored open content projects, such as MIT’s Open Courseware and Carnegie Mellon’s Open Learning Initiative.  Where the products of these initiatives have been adopted, they have supplemented, and in some instances replaced, traditional texts and other materials.  The educational publishing industry, however, has also responded by offering supplemental materials at no additional charge to maintain interest in their inventory.   These resources are not typically organized into whole courses and the interactions that surround them, but are offered in a format known in educational technology jargon as Reusable Learning Objects (RLOs), which are typically digital chunks and snippets of materials and curriculum guides offered in a variety of file types. They can be used as strategic parts of a larger course or curriculum, or as learning experiences that can often stand on their own.

MOOCs are essentially an extension of the open content concept, presented as an entire online course or as a series of related lectures with roots in programs offered at actual higher education institutions. As such, there are currently three recognized major MOOC producers.  The MIT/Harvard collaboration edX is an outgrowth of their Open Courseware Initiative, providing the next level  in open content to enable an experience more akin to a fully functioning online course and if desired, a process for gaininga university-backed certificate, albeit no direct MIT credit. Another university initiative spin-off is Udacity, which began life as a series of free computer science courses offered through Stanford University.  Coursera, a for-profit company founded by Stanford University computer science professors but not affiliated with that institution, was conceived as a hub for MOOCs developed at several participating institutions and as a venue for offering credit and certificates (for a fee) as well as integrated support services. The American Council onEducation recently approved five Coursera courses for college credit.

Khan Academy’s stated mission is “… the goal of changing education for the better by providing a free world-class education for anyone anywhere.”  Proponents of MOOCs, and open content in general, laud this very openness as a decentralized and democratic opportunity for access to what they view as a quality higher education experience. Doubters, for much the same reasons, are concerned about the potential disintermediation from the oversight of higher education institutions and their faculty. Both sides of the debate see the potential for alternative credentials outside of the traditional degree sequence, though each side obviously has a different opinion as to the relative merits of such an outcome.

This ends part 1--stay on the lookout for part 2, where Michael address specifically what's being done at community colleges in Massachusetts.