Last week I was somewhere between work, teaching, the NERCOMP symposium I co-facilitated and the annual Sloan Consortium Emerging Tech for Online conference. It was nice to see some familiar MOOC faces on both twitter and on the live stream presentations. I think it was in Jen Ross's presentation (of EDCMOOC fame) that a Rhizo14 participant was quoted anonymously.  I really didn't think

NOTE: this is a report of the post I wrote for Sloan-C back in November of 2013.  I am reposting here as a backup.  The original can be found here http://blog.sloanconsortium.org/2013/11/18/mooc-evaluation-beyond-the-certificate-of-completion/ This coming January will be my third year of involvement in MOOCs. Questions have come up in the last year around the issue of why students “drop

Since I have a captive, in a sense, audience, I thought I would use the power of the crowd to help me identify a suitable PhD program for myself :) Now, over the years I've been thinking about pursuing a PhD, but a sage mentor once told me that I should take at least a year break from school before making any decisions.  Essentially clear the head out, think about what I like to do, and then

I just realized that it's been a while since I've posted something on here. I guess compared to other blogs I am still a regular poster, but I'd like to post more often.  Well, here I am!  I guess time flies when you are having fun, and getting over a cold (have we found a cure for that yet?) This month has been a crazy month, in addition to the day job, and my part time teaching gig (which

Here it is! The final week of BlendKit2012! I know it is only a 5 week MOOC, but it seems to have gone by pretty quickly! The topic of this week, as with any well designed course, is evaluation - or: how do you know that your learning intervention (in this case designing a blended course) has worked and your learners walked away with the knowledge they need to be successful. The reading this week centered

After a tittle like that, I feel like this blog ought to have a theme song ;-) Is this too dorky? Not dorky enough?  Chime in through the comments :-) In any case, it's Week 2 of #cfhe12 and the topic of the week is New Pedagogies: New models for teaching and learning. I find it interesting (and ironic) that Blended Learning and Online Learning are considered "new pedagogies" and "new models."

Well, yesterday afternoon I got fired up when listening to the final panel discussion of the day at Sloan-C's annual ALN conference. The panel was titled "Evolution or Revolution? What’s Happening with “Traditional” Online Learning?" and I have broken down my thoughts by speaker. Jose Cruz (The Education Trust, US) This was a pretty interesting speaker, and he made a good point about putting

 It's week 3 of 5 in BlendKit2012, and this week's readings are on the topic of assessment (a pretty important topic if you ask me!). Thus far the contributions of my fellow participants have been pretty interesting to read as well (keep it up! :-)  ). In any case, this week's readings give the reader a quick overview of the testing types that an online environment affords, talks (briefly)

BlendKit, prepare to have your mind blown! OK, I am a exaggerating a bit, but I am going to come to this MOOC from a non-traditional approach. I've been thinking about the DIY activities, and I have to say that the DYI tools (4th column, DIY project deliverables) are pretty nifty; not just for blended learning, but also for instructional design purposes in general. Now, I don't think I will have a

This morning, while commuting to work, I was catching up on some blog posts from fellow #blendkit2012 participants and I came across a blog post titled Is blended the same as half-distance? but Andres Norberg. I was originally just going to comment on the blog post itself, but the response was getting quite lengthy, so I converted into a blog post. Anders asks: If traditional face-to-face education