Tag Archives: abe

Open Participants, Syndicated

Endorphin-induced thoughts…

29 degrees and not much wind at all … and I got out a little early.   I could hear talk and laughter from one early-party group this “Unofficial Saint Patrick’s Day.”

Imagining having funding. Imagining organizing (!yes, I think crazy thoughts on bike rides) the Urbana-Champaign node of OER innovations.  The technology and its development have reached a tipping point of accessibility and affordability.   We don’t have to wait at the doors of the Big Publishers for well-honed interactive resources.   (We *do* have to resist the urge to focus on the early adopters and neglect that honing part in pursuit of What’s The Latest and Greatest.)

I’m imagining teaming up with Pixo and/or our own folks.   Our App Development course started with educational apps for our faculty as the ‘recommended projects’ — can we take them to the next level?   The folks at Landmark School and The NEw Community School — we could cooperate to design mobile apps that included visual-kinesthetic engagement all the way through college math.

Doors have been opened to innovative approaches to make math requirements less of a barrier.   Many schools have re-designed their math courses entirely (think the Carnegie Pathways   and — trying to build concepts rather than procedures, and tackling some of the formidable affective issues students face.   THey’re using online learning… but they don’t really understand the actual, cognitive learning issues that many of the students who come in significantly under ‘college level’ face… and they don’t understand just how many of these folks are out there, underachieving. Let’s get a team together to make math accessible…and OPEN…  and now, back to my regularly scheduled program.  What with this online stuff, students want to be DONE on Friday, so it’s not a ‘dead’ day… *Eight* industrious souls here, before 9:00 a.m….full of questions…

Open Participants, Syndicated

Online courses

So!   IN between applying for a job to help enhance and create math courses… I’m trying to … build a math course!   For our folks who need to prep for the test … or already took the test and need to learn stuff…

We’ve got Modumath, but its online presence is — well, it’s *not* open, but it would be typical of an open effort.   Really great videos have been uploaded and you can go through the videos and answer questions as they play and get instant feedback.

There’s a printable PDF that has the same information in text form, and a self-test with answers.

There’s no adaptability at all.   There isn’t even individual … anything.   All users from a single license go to the same pages.

So!   Our job is to make this more individual.   THe tutorial videos are outstanding, albeit low-tech.   Our plan is to put the videos into modules, and then add our own quizzes.   Here’s where we can be … ADAPTABLE!   and USE BADGES 🙂   And … if it’s to prepare for a test that’s proctored ^3   then … cheating will, as my teachers always said, “only cheat yourself.”  (And there would be stuff for getting you motivated like you find here from MIT about getting you to write a little about your values before you do the stuff).

We can have a plain old “did you get it?” quiz… and then a Thing To Do If You Didn’t Get It that you have to do to take it again, and then … you don’t move on until you pass (though there Always Needs To Be An Alternative because sometimes you do need to move on).

… then, when we’ve built enough things around it, we can make our own modern videos and not have to have a subscription to another product.

Of course, if I do it here, it might be a challenge to make it open… but if I can stay a step ahead on my own — gee, I just *happen* to know about this OER video that will fit, because I already made it! — then…

… so tomorrow in the early hour the plan is to learn what the ‘grunt work’ part is, where we plop the video into the module… happily that’s the kind of task that I can do around working w/ students, unlike programming, which reading up on Lumen Learning made me recognize the potential value of learning.

I did a pretty good job with that Java stuff with the basics, and honestly I think the basics could work for making adaptable activities.   I did the silly integer app , right?   What if I really, honestly *had* focused hours each day for it?   LOL I’d probably get past 60 on my StackOverflow rep!!!   (I’m over 1100 on Canvas..)   I can dream, can’t I?

Open Participants, Syndicated

A new idea

LOL  the two minutes ’til end of work day and I DROVE THE CAR THING so I can’t even think about it well on the way home.

Here’s my next magic grant request.   Hey.   I really should figure it out and at least plop it on a few other blogs. 

So I’m doing all this totally tedious CRAP in Canvas — I want a quiz with images and a quiz without. (Sigh, I broke my lurk promise and posted a blog onto “Math Ed” about the tediosity.)

Well, I want a quiz with number bars and a quiz with domino icons and.

Wait… repeat activities should be done by computers.

Object oriented programming.

There will be lots of lessons that will want an “image” version.   (I’ll actually want a “drag and drop and manipulate” version but I can’t make that yet.)

There should be a program to walk me through that design so I can just input the questions and the images and the progression and … it should generate the interactive experiences.

Can I get a grant? Can I make it open?

Open Participants, Syndicated

#openlearning

Watched a video interview with the ‘connectedness coach’ or something like that for the course.

Truth be told, if I hadn’t had 15 hits on my little equity post, I’d have forgotten about #openlearning.   The semester has started so my job is actually serving students.  (Yesterday was a day I wished I had a way to keep track of what I did all day.   I was regaling it to my friend and kept having to say “Wait! Wait! There’s more!”)  There’s also the stuff of death and taxes that has eaten much of my focus.

Still, the “first week” of that cMOOC (‘connectivist’  so “learn from each other” rather than ‘here’s some lectures from MIT guys, aren’t you lucky?’)   doesn’t start ’til tomorrow — I suppose there are things in their LMS that will “open” then because right now it just claims (falsely) that each week listed on the syllabus will link to its details.

So far (right, xious… it hasn’t even **started** yet ~ )  it still feels like a whole lot of academic talk about the academic world and ‘openness.’

We are having some of those issues out on the front lines.   Friday’s anecdote #7 was a kiddo not being able to find courses to enroll in (starting at midterm since it’s too late for Spring)… I told him about our new online independent skill-building options and he said that well, he needed a course.   He knew that he just didn’t get things done independently.

(OTOH, anecdote #3 was the Brazilian who listened to a chunk of Modumath and said, “It’s perfect!  He talks slowly and explains things!” — and we’re trying to make that more open)

Lots of us on the edge of open — we’re the ones who *do.*   So … it’s easy for us to project that onto the rest of the world… a world of people who benefit from a lot more structure.   I actually remembered to ask people coming in for that independent stuff (it can be done on the internet anywhere but — guess what!! — they want to *go to school.*)  about making a folder and logging time and progress.   (I have qualms.   I cannot remember things like folders.   So far, though, *they have.*   All of ’em…. I really should get that other guy a folder…)

Why does that belong in this #openlearning blog post?   Because “open” should be better than “okay! open for swimming!” on the open seas.

We don’t have a “course” because … then we’d need students to be “in the system.”  They’d need the right kind of email address. Even if it’s open to everybody, they have to do a mess of paperwork and … some of the folks in some of hte groups who’d use it are undocumented.  I’d like to see us set up “houses” like Hogwarts and … you can pick your character.   (Didn’t Second Life do something like that?)

Then *if you so choose* you can find ways to connect with your identity and get credentials.

If “open” is open to people with the right tech equipment, the right tech skills, and even then there are hoops to navigate…  per the section in Fifty Shades of Open  about “open means use,”  that’s not really open.

How to provide the structure so many people need for good learning … without that structure turning into insurmountable hurdles?   Let’s explore…