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Monday
“OER”
Friday
my Open Education 2011 Talk
was on Collaborative Lesson Planning, a method for teachers to make lesson plans together that are better and take less time.
Video for the talk should be available tomorrow on the Open Ed 2011 Conference’s YouTube channel. For now, here is an audio recording of most of my speech. Thank you Mikhail Gershovich for recording it and the inspiring folks at DS106 radio for streaming it live and recording it for me and you.
Click here to download an mp3 of my talk. It starts a couple of minutes in, but you’ll get the idea.
To help follow, read an html version of the pad I used as an outline for the talk. Thanks to those in the audience kind enough to contribute!
What do you think of my talk or Collaborative Lesson Planning in general? Please put your comments below!
Thursday
an ENG 099 MOOC?
Finished the formal part of my second day of the 8th annual Open Education Conference about an hour ago. Heading over to the BBQ next. Thought about posting my notes like I did yesterday, but decided to take a different approach today.
With this post I want to outline something I’ve been thinking about for a while: teaching a class online on English as a Second Language; but which has gotten intellectual rocketfuel in my mind at this conference, especially after Jim Groom’s keynote this morning.
For context, Jim had been teaching his course DS106 for a bit, then he decided to do it online and in a way where anyone in the world could sign-up. Then it got, like, wildly popular and now has radio and tv stations, ya know the whole shebang. He said in this morning it wasn’t a Massive Open Online Course, or MOOC, but thinking of it as a MOOC works.
I was already planning on expanding my ENG 099 Conversational American English (Download PDF, 1.7 MB) into Open CourseWare anyway, and now I’m thinking of then offering it as a MOOC, something along the lines of DS106.
I need to do more research, but a rough road map is:
- Revised and expand textbook, making it appropriate for a quarter or semester long course.
- OCW the course along the lines of MIT’s or, preferably, Saylor’s, i.e. make a course page and add videos, lecture notes, handouts, more activities, etc.
- Hack a wordpress blog to make it MOOC friendly, along the lines of the DS106 version. Also get a website ready so I could broadcast lectures, maybe a html site with Ustream, etherpad and IRC embedded, or something.
- Start finding students and offer the course as quarter or semester long. To make money I’m thinking of letting students pay as much as they want, charging for tutoring in addition to the course and/or charging students for a certificate of completion including evaluation of their e-portfolio.
It’s pretty rough right now, but I think this could work and is something I want to follow through on once I get back from the conference. Another thing Jim stressed in his talk was how we could be focusing on “Open Educational Experiences” as opposed to just “Open Educational Resources”. I totally agree, the experience of learning is what counts not having tons of sweet, open materials. Continuing, unlike generating those materials which may require grant money, venture capital investment, university approval, what have you, DS106 shows you don’t need ay ny of that to make something magical where many folks learn and leave a wake that others can build from.
p.s. I was interviewed by Grant and Chris for DS106 radio, hopefully I’ll have links to those soon!
