Tag Archive: Massive Open Online Course


WISING UP TO MOOCS

John Covach captured questioning the value of mainstream pop in one of his MOOC lectures,

Prof. John Covach captured questioning the value of mainstream pop in one of his MOOC lectures on the History of Rock.

Interesting observations by University of Rochester professor John Corvach about his experience of preparing and presenting his History of Rock MOOC  which I am currently enrolled on via Coursera.

He sees these online courses as complementing rather than competing with the frontal lessons he gives to non-virtual classes.

He writes: “My experience has caused me to stop thinking of the MOOC as an alternative to the traditional college course. It is rather something like a very organized series of public lectures based on the structure of a college course.

Continue reading

SHTICKS, GAGS AND MONKEY BUSINESS

MONKEY BUSINESS directed by Norman Z.McLeod (USA, 1931)

After two movies based on vaudeville shows, Monkey Business was the first Marx Brothers film written specially for the big screen. It’s included on the syllabus of the  The Language of Hollywood  Coursera MOOC to show how, with the coming of sound, many films of the 1930s were not dependent on innovative auteurs but relied on the ability of the players to generate the entertainment.

Effectively, this means that the director’s job is reduced to simply pointing the camera and relying on the timing of the performers.

The Marx Brothers had honed their comic skills on Broadway and knew exactly what audiences wanted, as is proven by the huge success of this movie.

Theirs is the essence of situation comedy with the specific situations here being a ship, a high-class party and a barn. Most of the action takes place on board an ocean liner where the four brothers are stowaways. Continue reading

THE SILENT MELODRAMA OF STREET ANGEL

STREET ANGEL directed by Frank Borzage (USA, 1928)

street-angel-borzageThis week I began a 5 week MOOC in film history at Coursera run by Scott Higgins of Wesleyan University called ‘The Language of Hollywood: Storytelling, Sound, and Color’.  Street Angel is the first of ten movies on the syllabus and will be a hard act to follow.

What a great film this is!

It was chosen because it was made at a time when silent movies were about to be replaced by talkies and shows how directors with visual style didn’t really need dialogue to tell a rich and emotionally powerful story.

Prof Higgins says, rightly, that “it contains all that is great and weird about silent films”. Continue reading

OPEN EDUCATION: MARKING MOOCS

Robo-teacher

“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

Exploring rhizomatic learning – activity 20 of the OU Open Education MOOC

Rhizomatic

Dave Cromier considers the nature of  joined up learning networks.

I used to live next door to a reclusive old lady whose neglected back garden was like a jungle. Once a year she would come out armed with a range of electric tools to blitz everything in sight but obviously it all just grew back again.

Leggy raspberry plants were the most pervasive and these would spread over into my garden. These had long passed the time when they bore fruit so they were just an eyesore with prickly stems.

This all goes to prove that everything in a garden isn’t always lovely and that even the most perfect seeming eco-system sometimes needs a helping hand.

This came to mind after watching Dave Cormier’s video, Embracing Uncertainty – Rhizomatic Learning in Formal Education (2012).

The American Heritage Dictionary define a rhizome – pronounced ‘rise-ohm’ – as “a horizontal, usually underground stem that often sends out roots and shoots from its nodes”.

Cormier likes the idea of things growing out of plain view which have no real start and no real end. His organic metaphor contrasts with the conventional idea of educational networks as something more clinical and organized with lots of clean lines, neatly connected. Continue reading