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Weekly summary: week 6

This week has been very busy with travelling so I didn’t have that much time to spend on my lifestream in the second half of the week.

The tutorial was really helpful and it was great to share exeriences about our chosen MOOCs. It made me think more about the ethical issues of my micro-ethnography. I’m going to post a message on the forum that I’m planning to use for my study to make others aware. I originally thought that I wouldn’t have to do this because I’m not planning to identify anyone but Jeremy clarified that just because someone isn’t identified we have the right to use the content they have shaped. And just because something is public doesn’t mean that it is ethical to use in research. boyd & Crawford (2012:672) raise some important questions: ‘Should someone be included as a part of a large aggregate of data? What if someone’s ‘public’ blog post is taken out of context and analyzed in a way that the author never imagined? What does it mean for someone to be spotlighted or to be analyzed without knowing it? Who is responsible for making certain that individuals and communities are not hurt by the research process? What does informed consent look like?’ They remind us that ‘In order to act ethically, it is important that researchers reflect on the importance of accountability: both to the field of research and to the research subjects.’

References:

danah boyd & Kate Crawford (2012) CRITICAL QUESTIONS FOR BIG DATA,
Information, Communication & Society, 15:5, 662-679, DOI: 10.1080/1369118X.2012.678878

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MOOCs Make Way For SPOCs In The Global Education Of Tomorrow

‘But the year ahead heralds a new decade, and with it SPOCs from players who are rethinking the role that online pedagogy can play to bring the world’s most reputable universities to global markets.’ Arguably, $5000 for a four-day course is not something that is achievable for the majority of students.

For most of us, an education from one of the world’s leading universities is inaccessible and unaffordable.

from Pocket https://www.forbes.com/sites/mattsymonds/2019/12/07/moocs-make-way-for-spocs-in-the-global-education-of-tomorrow/
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There is no Open in MOOC

Coursera’s announcement to add Specializations to its roster of educational packages comes with a new price in many cases, as noted in Carl Straumsheim’s 1/29 piece at Inside Higher Ed.

from Pocket https://allmoocs.wordpress.com/2016/01/29/there-is-no-open-in-mooc/
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Education Technology and the Promise of ‘Free’ and ‘Open’

Audrey Watters analysing some of the predictions that were made for MOOCs and open education. According to her, ‘most of the predictions and promises have been broken’ as MOOCs now often cost money and are not really ‘open’.

This is part four of my annual review of the year in ed-tech The Rebranding of MOOCs Remember 2012, “The Year of the MOOC?” Remember in 2012 when Udacity co-founder Sebastian Thrun predicted that in fifty years, “there will be only 10 institutions in the world delivering higher education and U

from Pocket http://hackeducation.com/2016/12/07/top-ed-tech-trends-free-open
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What we don’t yet know about open educational resources (opinion)

‘Methodological challenges abound in classroom research on teaching, as learning is complex. Many challenges can be overcome with strong research design. There are benchmarks for conducting research on teaching and learning (Felton, 2013; Wilson-Doenges and Gurung, 2013), and it would be prudent for more educational researchers to use them.’ This article highlights the problems with research into OER and the need for robust research design.

In an age of fake news, I took solace in the fact that science has a peer-review process that separates the wheat from the chaff. It was reassuring to think that authors had sifted and winnowed through reams of research to present key findings.

from Pocket https://www.insidehighered.com/digital-learning/views/2018/11/14/what-we-dont-yet-know-about-open-educational-resources-opinion
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