I have been busy with some work on my research and data analysis in the summer and I haven't written something since July. However, I am not regularly blogging but I try to keep writing from time to time!
I am starting this fall with the open online courses (
MOOCs) I am interested in following if not actively participating. I have been participating in some Moocs already and I don't think I have time in this very busy moments of my research to spend in MOOCs in spite of my willingness though.
Following the previous open courses by
George Siemens,
Stephen Downes and
Dave Cormier, they have been planning after #CCK11 to offer a new course as an inclusive of all #MOOCs to discuss various issues relating to open and digital scholarship, networked learning, open education, PLE, and all stuff that has been covered in other courses. So, they came up with #change11 MOOC;
Change: Education, Learning and Technology to discuss all those important issues and to answer some crucial questions also about the future of education as posed in the course page:
"
- How does learning change when formal boundaries are reduced?
- What is the future of learning?
- What role with educators play in this future?
- What types of institutions does society need to respond to hyper-growth of knowledge and rapid dissemination of information?
- How do the roles of learners and educators change when knowledge is ubiquitous?"
This is a 36-week course starting this week and lasts until May 2012. Each week with an innovative educator, researcher or scholar from different countries to discuss all of the above issues of present and future learning and create a global understanding and learning experience. Here is the
course schedule with the list of the topics and speakers.
Another open course is
EC&I 831: Social Media & Open Education , #eci831, offered by
Alec Couros from the University of Regina, Canada starting this week and lasts until December. I have attended last year this course and I liked the whole learning experience and interaction,s and I am going to take part again as much as my time allows . Especially because Alec is an inspiring open educator and creates such motivating learning environments in his courses.
The structure of these MOOCs are almost the same, distributed across the web, using various tools and platforms by the participants to collaborate, communicate and create learning reflections and artifacts in different forms on blogs, wikis, FB, twitter etc. augmented by a number of live weekly sessions which bring together people to discuss their ideas and negotiate different topics of interest which all make such a ubiquitous, rich, self-directed learning.