I LOVE MOOCs!! MOOC stands for Massive Open Online Course. These courses are free (thus the open) and most are offered by accredited colleges and universities. How much they count towards a degree or towards professional development depends on where you are and what establishment is offering the course. But the intrinsic benefits are immeasurable.
Coursara is probably the most popular MOOC catalog. There are literally hundreds of courses spanning all types of topics in many fields. I, honestly, have never finished a Coursara course because I found the demands of the courses to much for my limited time with no real compensation. I have done two MOOCs through ISTE, though, that were so engaging and so informative.
My most recent MOOC is Personalized and Student-Centered Learning. I was first interested in this MOOC because personalized learning was part of my schools redesign initiative. We did a lot of work with our blended learning initiative (not enough in my opinion, though), but we had done very little with actually personalization of learning. I think the thinking was, "Oh, we are going to do blended learning and because it's blended learning, it will automatically be personalized." I, however, being a technology geek/nerd did not feel that this was a sufficient answer to how personalizing was going to come about and how it was going to be incorporated into my classroom.
So far, I am in week 2 of this course and I am enthusiastic on what I've seen and participated so far. This week, we had to watch a video, read some articles, participate in a Padlet (awesome tool for assessment and collaboration), and had to create a blog post about what we learned. Now that you have the background, let me get into the content:
I believe that every student comes to class already with a large knowledge base and can learn whatever you put in front of them. What a student can demonstrate, however, depends on what exactly their knowledge base is and how they are engaged in your classroom. I think personalized learning gives me and the student to create a whole picture for the student as a learner. Personalized learning allows us to see, not only the beginning skills of a student, but also provides a guide as to where the student needs to be and how we are going to get them their. Personalized learning provides insights as to how the student learns, who they can rely on to help them, what their interests are, what their goals for the class, school and life are and how we can incorporate all these factors into the learning of the student.
I have included personalized learning already in my classroom in several ways. First, I give students a choose as to how many Do Now questions they answer and as what level they answer them. Easier questions are worth the minimal amount of points and a student needs to do more of them. Harder questions are worth more points and a student needs to do less of them. Second, I offer a student the choose as to what activities they work on for the day (with guidance). A student has the option to work directly with the teacher, work in a group with other students or work independently. Third, the assignments a student can do at the independent group are varied depending on their ability level and what they still need to work on mastery for. Finally, all assignments are posted in Google Classroom allowing a student to access content outside of class and complete assignments that they could not finish before the end of class. I am still working on making these aspect more personalize. All students have a Chromebook in my classroom which makes personalization more feasible.
The pros of personalized learning is that the student is more engaged and more motivated to participate and complete assignments. Completion of assignments is also done at a higher level. More students are putting more effort into the assignments they are working on. The cons of personalized learning, that I have encountered so far, is that it is time-consuming. Instead of coming up with one assignment for one lesson, I have to create at least three activities to plan. I then have to grade and comment on at least three activities. Managing activities in a station rotation model blended learning environment is another challenge. This model is not new to me, but it is very new to my students. That means they are constantly demanding my attention when they should be relying more on each other. This challenge I know will be eased over time, though, as students become more comfortable with our work.
(NOTE: I intended to use a fancy image here, but not every web-based app has made to the switch to support HTML 5 and Web 2.0. Therefore, some of the web apps that I have used in the passed are no longer available in Chrome. When I find an alternative to such a text heavy post, I will alter this post and/or use them in future posts.)
for Education
