Hapgood

Mike Caulfield's latest web incarnation. Networked Learning, Open Education, and Online Digital Literacy

December 2013

  • Synchronous Online is About To Get Much, Much Better

    Synchronous Online Sucks Synchronous online — the twisted mess of chat-rooms, video-conferencing, and screen-sharing we use for real-time online education — has sucked for a while now. To be sure we have products: it’s rare for a university to not have *some* web video-conferencing solution in place. And from what I understand, these products, at… Continue reading

  • (Educational) Research Isn’t Broken But the Culture Is

    Great post today out on Simply Statistics. In it, the author critiques the claim that most research is false, finding claims of a reproducibility crisis are probably overstated at this point, but concluding the following steps are still necessary: We need more statistical literacy We need more computational literacy We need to require code be… Continue reading

  • Use of MOOC Community Features in Blended Scenarios, Dan Ariely Edition

    As readers of this blog know, Amy Collier and I have been making a year-long argument that MOOC community features, as currently designed, are often perceived by blended students as low-to-no-value substitutes for local interaction. That made this snippet of MOOC-runner Dan Ariely talking about his own class’s use of the MOOC rather interesting: Dan… Continue reading

  • Can People Designing Multiple Choice Tests for MOOCs Please Study Designing Multiple Choice Tests?

    David Kernohan has a post up titled How I got a “first” on a FutureLearn MOOC with one weird old trick… over at FOTA, and it does just what it says on the tin. In the post, David details how he was able to get an 87.4% on a FutureLearn test for a course module without studying… Continue reading

  • Why the Why Matters

    A quick follow-up to yesterday’s post on the supposed “death of theory” and its relation to MOOC research — the story thus far is that a number of people sincerely think the “why” doesn’t matter if our sample is big enough and the variables tracked are numerous enough. Here’s a typical quote from Thrun: One… Continue reading

  • Stocks, Flows, and the 80% Non-traditional Figure

    At the MOOC Research Initiative conference Jeff Selingo gave what I thought was a capable presentation of the current landscape of higher education. People might quibble with a point or two, but overall it was a relatively balanced, hysteria-free overview of a market which is not necessarily “broken”, but is poised to undergo some relatively… Continue reading

  • Short Notes on the Absence of Theory

    Martin Weller, Stephen Downes, and Matt Crosslin have been kicking around the “post-theory” critique of MRI ’13 that came up in a discussion Jim Groom and I had Thursday night in the middle of a bar in the middle of a hotel in the middle of an ice storm. I thought I might just add… Continue reading

  • MRI 13

    I’ve just finished attending the MOOC Research Initiative conference and workshop, which felt not so much a conference on MOOCs to me as the beginning of something else. We kick Courdacity-style MOOCs around a  lot, but if all MOOCs did was bring this level of intelligence and insight into problems of online learning, it would… Continue reading

  • Counting History PhD Employment

    I used to do more statistical literacy stuff on this blog, and I’m toying with the idea of going back to that. The problem is that the stuff that really tends to matter is stuff everybody thinks they already know, but which most people have not built habits around. It’s not really fascinating stuff to… Continue reading