MOOC

#LTMOOC16 – Success in a MOOC

Reading Time: 2 minutes

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r8avYQ5ZqM0]

I started the Curatr ‘elearning…. beyond the next button!’ MOOC this week, facilitated by Craig Taylor. I found the introductory ‘Success in a MOOC’ video really useful. This is a video by Dave Cormier from 2010, shared under Creative Commons on YouTube and pulled in to the MOOC to provide some orientation / guidance. I’ve completed a few MOOCs over the years and have dropped out of many more and found Dave’s advice really useful. He suggests that success in a MOOC can be achieved in 5 steps.

What we can learn from the ephemeral web

Reading Time: 4 minutes

Learning Platforms have flourished in the past decade, and as they have scaled with the rise of MOOCs, the data inside them has also become increasingly valuable. Different people see different value in this data. Some want to analyse data to predict outcomes and trigger early interventions when needed. Others want to analyse large datasets to advance machine learning techniques. Many more just see dollar signs in anything related to ‘big data’ so, in true startup fashion, they start collecting huge quantities of learner data now in anticipation of monetising it later.

Virtual College trademarks the term VOOC

Reading Time: 3 minutes

VOOC_Batman

A few times in recent months I’ve had a new MOOC term pass through my Twitter feed.  We haven’t had a new MOOC spin-off acronym for a good 6 months. I don’t know what’s happened to the edtech marketers, maybe they’ve been off on holiday on their new yachts spending all those edtech venture capital billions. Anyway, after a quiet start to 2014, we finally have a new buzzword to get excited about: VOOCs. Yay!

Building bridges between Higher Education and Corporate L&D

Reading Time: 4 minutes

I came across this nice line from my old boss Donald Clark’s blog recently: “Much as Higher Education would like to think it has a monopoly on learning, it is merely one in many, many layers in the learning cake.”

True words and they got me thinking about some experiences good and bad, past and present, that I have had as a learning and development professional interacting with the Higher Education world from the ‘outside’.