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Using R – my initial thoughts.
I’m helping out on a course that teaches IT and numeracy skills to first-year undergraduates in Biological Sciences. As I’m new to the university, this is the first time I’ve been involved with this...
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A moan about Google Plus
I’ve been using Google+ for a couple of months now. I have a number of circles based around my interests, some of which are personal, and some professional. Some people I’ve added because I know their...
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MOOCs and participant pedagogy
I’m taking part in MoocMooc, a mooc about moocs. Each day we’re given some articles and questions as a starting point and today the theme is participant pedagogy and the questions are: How does the...
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MoocMooc – Looking Back
I’m taking part in MoocMooc, a mooc about moocs. It’s one of the shorter MOOCs at one week long and our final day’s task is to reflect on our experiences over the week. So what are my thoughts after a...
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Statistical MOOCing
I’ve recently started yet another MOOC. This time it’s Coursera’s Statistics One. It’s early days yet (I’m only on lecture two), but there are some interesting contrasts with another statistics MOOC I...
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Coursera Statistics Week Two – Mr Grumpy Comes to Town
I’m coming to the end of week two of the Coursera Statistics One course, with just the quiz and assignment to do over the weekend. There have been a lot of forum postings because people are having...
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But … but … that’s not what I said
I’m coming to the end of week three of Coursera’s statistics one course, and this week we’ve been looking at regression and hypothesis testing. Once again, the subject matter has been very good. I’ll...
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OverMOOCed
My last couple of posts may have come across as me being critical of MOOCs. I’m not, although I do have criticisms around how some of the MOOCs are implemented and whether they’re as disruptive and...
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MOOCs – Distance Learning Done Badly?
Image credit Long ago, in the dim distant past, when mobile phones were the size of suitcases and browsers were just people looking around a shop I studied using distance learning materials. It was the...
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Learning Outcomes – What have they ever done for us?
Picture credit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Archery_target.jpg We have a monthly pedagogical research group meeting and the topic for December was learning outcomes (LOs). We based our...
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Troops as teachers?
This post will be a little different from my usual posts in that it’s not about MOOCs, it’s UK-focussed, and also more political than usual. The UK Government recently announced a new programme to fast...
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MOOCs: a stroppy teenager?
What I want to do in this post is look at where the xMOOCs (from the likes of Coursera, Udacity and Edx) sit within the educational landscape, i.e. where do they sit conceptually? In some ways, they’re...
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The Culture of Student Feedback
Feedback is a big issue in education – how much students get, and how (or if) they use it. Feedback features in the annual National Student Survey, and no matter how good the institutional results it...
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Carrots and sticks – not good enough even for donkeys?
In my last post I looked at student feedback and talked about institutional inertia in implementing new practice. Over the last couple of days I’ve come across blog posts that have led me to consider...
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Maths and Mindset
An word-based maths problem Dr Jenny Koenig from the university of Cambridge was the presenter at one of our regular PedR meetings (pedagogical research group) recently. Now, I actually like maths. One...
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New year, new MOOC
New year, and yet another MOOC. I’ve started ‘Sustainability, Society and You‘ with Futurelearn. It’s not my first time with Futurelearn – I completed their web science MOOC in December – so it would...
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First Impressions of a Climate Change MOOC – Will the Climate Change?
I’ve just finished the second week of the University of Exeter’s climate change course through Futurelearn, and thought I’d post some reflections. First, the pedagogy. I’m still unsure about the linear...
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What’s special about specialisations?
Coursera has launched its ‘specialisations‘ program. These are groups of existing courses in the same subject area with signature track options, followed by a two-week ‘capstone exam’ that reviews and...
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Plagiarism in MOOCs – whose loss?
I’m enrolled on a few MOOCs at the moment (no surprise there), some for work and some for personal interest. The two for personal interest are the Marine Megafauna course from Duke University on...
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Nice subject, shame about the platform
One thing that tends to get pushed to the sidelines when talking about MOOCs is the issue of what platform it runs on. We talk about pedagogy, assessment, scalability, and grumble about particular...
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