Online Learning and the Tyranny of the Database

A recent Techcrunch article concerning MOOCs suggested that a majority of people teaching online felt their online course shouldn’t count for college credit. And yet, a refrain I have heard several times recently is that online courses are actually more difficult than the face-to-face course, which got me thinking about what exactly is meant by ‘difficult’. And I realized that one of the things online courses do much better than face to face courses is generate data.

In most online course systems, in order to track progress in the course, and in fact just to make the course operate at all, a great deal of data is tracked. I can look in our system and know when a user logged in, when they clicked a link, when and how they answer questions, what material they looked at for how long, etc. This is not some sort of spyware – it’s just how the system works. But for many people, this data equates to the idea that ‘time spent in system’ is equal to ‘time spent learning’. It is not uncommon for someone to ask for this complete range of data to verify that a course was ‘done right’.

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Weekly Ed-Tech / Digital Scholarship Trends: March 13, 2013

Digital Public Library of America

Besides transitioning to the Twitter account @dpla, the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) announced it will provide copies of 1.2 million digital objects to the DPLA. If you’re interested in learning more about the non-profit, there’s a brief Q&A with the new DPLA Executive Director, Dan Cohen. The launch will take place April 18-19, 2013 at the Boston Public Library.

California Bill Demands Credit for Online Courses (MOOCs)

As reported in the New York Times and Inside Higher Ed, a new bill to be filed by California Senate President Darrell Steinberg “aims to create a ‘statewide system of faculty-approved, online college courses.'” [1] (more…)

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