Martin Weller - ANIMAL MY SOUL

Tag Archive: Martin Weller

OPEN EDUCATION: MARKING MOOCS

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May 5, 2013

“Shouldn’t there be a dot on that ‘i’?” – Can machines help humans mark MOOCs?

The issue of how a mark MOOCs is a moot point at the moment.

As Europeans race to play catch up with their U.S. counterparts, (no educational body left behind!?), two glaring questions rise to the fore in many articles about these massive open online courses.

These are:

How do institutions make money from them?
Will MOOC students be able to gain credits for offline courses?

The answer to both these questions, in my view, ultimately rests on how the courses are evaluated. Continue reading →

Tags: Cloudworks, Edinburgh University, Elearning, Martin Weller, Massive Open Online Course, National Council of Teachers of English, OER, open education, Open University, Stephen Downes

WHY OPEN EDUCATION IS NOT AN OPTION

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March 12, 2013

Scholars can no longer seek refuge in an ivory tower.

Today, to mark Open Education week, I began looking at the readings for the Open University’s h817 Open Education course .

I started with an article by Martin Weller entitled ‘The openness-creativity cycle in education’ and published in the Journal of Interactive Media Education (JiME).

In this paper, Weller notes that the concept of openness in education is now taken for granted and that few talk in terms of resources being ‘closed’ or limited solely to an elite (paying) group of users.

He quotes from Gideon Burton’s article on the ‘Open Scholar’ : “In the digital age, the traditional barriers to accessing scholars and scholarships are unnecessary, but persist for institutional reasons”.

This begs the question as to how long these institutionalised barriers can resist to pressure from the digital networks in which Open Educational Resources (OER) are becoming the norm.

With sharing being the default position the million dollar question as to how this actually improves the learning process. Continue reading →