Posted in October 2016
What have they done with the MOOCs?! The impact of MOOCs on Campus Education
Article published in the Conference Proceedings of The EADTU Online, Open and Flexible Higher Education Conference 19-21 October 2016 in Rome.
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Can Learners be Earners? Investigating a Design to Enable MOOC Learners to Apply their Skills and Earn Money in an Online Market Place
This article is published in the journal IEEE Transactions on Learning Technologies.
Abstract
Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) aim to educate the world. More often than not, however, MOOCs fall short of this goal — a majority of learners are already highly educated (with a Bachelor degree or more) and come from specific parts of the (developed) world. Learners from developing countries without a higher degree are underrepresented, though desired, in MOOCs. One reason for those learners to drop out of a course can be found in their financial realities and the subsequent limited amount of time they can dedicate to a course besides earning a living. If we could pay learners to take a MOOC, this hurdle would largely disappear. With MOOCS, this leads to the following fundamental challenge: How can learners be paid at scale? Ultimately, we envision a recommendation engine that recommends tasks from online market places such as Upwork or witmart to learners, that are relevant to the course content of the MOOC. In this manner, the learners learn and earn money. To investigate the feasibility of this vision, in this paper we explored to what extent (1) online market places contain tasks relevant to a specific MOOC, and (2) learners are able to solve real-world tasks correctly and with sufficient quality. Finally, based on our experimental design, we were also able to investigate the impact of real-world bonus tasks in a MOOC on the general learner population.
Reference
Guanliang Chen, Dan Davis, Markus Krause, Efthimia Aivaloglou, Claudia Hauff, Geert-Jan Houben, “Can Learners be Earners? Investigating a Design to Enable MOOC Learners to Apply their Skills and Earn Money in an Online Market Place”, IEEE Transactions on Learning Technologies, vol. , no. , pp. 1, 5555, doi:10.1109/TLT.2016.2614302
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Push or Pull Students into Blended Education: a Case Study at Delft University of Technology
Paper is published in the International Journal of Engineering Education (ISSN 0949-149X) Volume 32 Number 5(A).
Abstract
Blended education, or ‘‘flipping the classroom’’ is rapidly becoming a mainstream form of teaching within universities. Within Engineering Education, it is popular as it allows more time in-class to focus on hands on activities such as demonstrations and solving complex problems. This paper discusses the effort conducted to re-structure, according to the blended learning principles, the ‘‘Propulsion and Power’’ course of the Aerospace Engineering Bachelor degree programme at Delft University of Technology (TU Delft). The redesigned course was supported by a dedicated online & blended education unit within the university, and is characterized by a very peculiar structure due to the different approach chosen by the two involved lecturers. The first lecturer decided to ‘‘pull’’ the students, by proposing a number of additional videos available in the World Wide Web as a support and complement to the material taught in class. Conversely, the second lecturer opted for a ‘‘push’’ approach, self-recording theory videos to be watched by the students at home and devoting the in-class hours to exercises and applications of the theory. This format resulted in a clear improvement of the average exam grades and pass rates. The student feedback showed enthusiasm about the new blended course, with only a very small minority still preferring the previous, more traditional approach. Although there seems to be a slight preference of students towards the ‘‘push’’ strategy, the ‘‘pull’’ approach has also been widely appreciated.
However, the objective to re-attract students to the contact hours in class was only partially achieved, since just a slight improvement in the number of attending students was observed. This paper clearly shows that the efforts to implement a blended teaching strategy has great benefits for both students and staff alike.
Keywords
blended learning; online education; student engagement; electronic assessment; aerospace engineering
Reference
Cervone, A., Melkert, J.A., Mebus, L.F.M., Saunders-Smits, G.N. (2016). Push or Pull Students into Blended Education. A Case Study at Delft University of Technology. In International Journal of Engineering Education. Volume 32 Number 5A. ISSN 0949-149X (page 1911-1921)