NaNoWriMo & the MOOC Relationship

National Novel Writing Month, known colloquially as NaNoWriMo, starts today and runs through the month of November, encouraging participants to write 50,000 words toward a novel.  This is the 14th year of NaNoWriMo, and the number of registered participants has grown from 21 “overcaffeinated yahoos” to more than a quarter of a million in 2011.  And while media buzz for NaNoWriMo continues to grow, its press popularity dwarfs that of other massive online learning environments, specifically MOOCs.  

Social Learning in Independent Spaces?

I recently posted a response to a research paper by Terry Anderson which looked at the various modes of interaction across learning platforms and spaces.  Among the important and interesting notes was Anderson’s assertion that high quality learning could happen if one of three interactions (student-student, student-teacher or student-content) was of a high quality, regardless of the quality of the other two.  Yet in my reading of Anderson’s work, I saw him continue to discuss student-student interactions with great importance, moreso than he gave to student-teacher or student-content.  This ties into some existing learning theory popular today, most notably social learning theory (though, to be general, the Canadians like to call it social cognition) via Bandura (and Vygotsky’s social development theory).

MOOC Revenues: Does MOOC = University of Phoenix?

From a Chronicle of Higher Education article looking at potential ways MOOC-affiliated universities (the article defines MOOC as what scholars would call xMOOC) could benefit financially through the MOOC affiliation, an interesting and snippy comment about MOOCs and the University of Phoenix:

Ms. Koller insists that the courses the company is offering differ fundamentally from those at the University of Phoenix. “Their online effort is really traditional teaching mediated by the computer as opposed to using the tech in a fundamental way,” she argues. “There’s no economies of scale there. What we’re doing is one instructor, 50,000 students. This is the way to bend the cost curves.”

More from Week 1 of #CFHE12 – The Invisible College, Eroding Teachers, etc.

Continuing through my lit review log (which I plan to follow later in the week with some attempt at synthesis) of the first week of Current/Future State of Higher Education cMOOC:

Three Reasons Why India Will Lead EdTech in the 21st Century – Dr. Joshua Kim flags India as the prime sector for educational technology growth in the 21st Century, due to demand, culture and mobility (of devices and use).  Reading his thoughts, I wonder what his definition of educational technology is.  Is it apps?  Software?  Data collection and learning analytics?