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Would it work for UC?

Byuclafaculty

We have noted in prior posts that the Regents (with a push from Gov. Brown) are interested in promoting online education at UC.  A somewhat different model is noted today in a brief article in Inside Higher Ed.  Online education, even if aimed at a mass audience, is often (not always) a pre-recorded program.  That is, something is put online and students access it at their convenience individually.  The article in Inside Higher Ed reports that Yale, Columbia, and Cornell are using video conferencing (so it’s live and at a fixed time) for small courses (capped at 12 students in less popular languages.  Languages taught or to be taught include Romanian, Dutch, Zulu, and others. You can find the article at:
http://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2012/11/21/columbia-cornell-yale-collaborate-languages

Yours truly regularly does an online video conference call with a systemwide Senate group roughly the size of the small classes described above.  Presumably, the participants in the language courses see each other (so up to 13 images at once).  If that is what is being done by the three universities, to be used in a class, their technology would have to be a lot better than the system used for my conference calls.

And can you see me?

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Jerry Brown Looks for an Online Course that Requires No Human Interaction

Byuclafaculty

At the Regents meeting of January 22, 2014, Gov. Brown seems to be searching for an online course that requires no human interaction.  Such a course, he reasons, could have unlimited enrollment because it is completely self-contained.  He gets some pushback from UC Provost Dorr, who thinks courses should have such interaction.  You can hear this excerpt at the link below.  The entire meeting of the Committee on Educational Policy of the Regents was posted yesterday.[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3tYFLJvrE3g?feature=player_detailpage]

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Listen to Part of the Regents Afternoon Session of 1-22-2014

Byuclafaculty

As we have noted in numerous prior posts, the Regents refuse to archive their meetings beyond one year.  So we dutifully record the sessions in real time.  Below is a link to part of the afternoon session of Jan. 22.  This segment is mainly the Committee on Educational Policy.  Gov. Brown was in attendance.  We will separately (later) provide links just to certain Brown segments.  But for now, we provide a continuous recording. There was discussion of designating certain areas of UC-Merced as nature reserves, followed by discussion of a new telescope.  The discussion then turned to online ed and…

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MOOCs in the Muck

Byuclafaculty

Good question! Inside Higher Ed today runs an article on MOOC offerings at the U of Texas and Cornell.  At the former, there are the usual extremely low completion rates.  At the latter, resident students are asking the question in the photo at the right: …”A year after UT began rolling out nine Massive Online Open Courses, the results are in,” The Daily Texan wrote in a Jan. 29 editorial… Among the “results” are completion rates ranging from 1 to 13 percent, the lack of credit granting courses and the $150,000 to $300,000 production costs…  (S)tudents at Cornell voiced similar concerns,…

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MOOc

Byuclafaculty

An interesting analysis of MOOCs in a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper by Stanford economist Caroline M. Hoxby suggests that heavy dependence on online ed won’t work for what she terms highly selective post-secondary educational institutions.  In essence, such institutions depend in important ways on alumni loyalty which is hard to obtain if students take courses online that come from anywhere. Abstract: I consider how online postsecondary education, including massive open online courses (MOOCs), might fit into economically sustainable models of postsecondary education. I contrast nonselective postsecondary education (NSPE)in which institutions sell fairly standardized educational services in return…

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Whatever happened to the era of limits?

Byuclafaculty

In his first iteration as governor, back in the 1970s and early 1980s, Gov. Brown emphasized the “era of limits.”  Yesterday at the Regents, however, he apparently wanted to push those limits when it came to online education:  Jerry Brown pushes UC to find “outer limits” of online education …Sitting in on part of Wednesday’s meeting, Brown challenged regents to develop classes that require no “human intervention” and might expand the system’s reach beyond its student body.  “If this university can probe into” black holes, he said, “can’t somebody create a course — Spanish, calculus, whatever — totally online? That…