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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4rrKwyVU1DM

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massive_open_online_course

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_N_NHbC80E

https://www.openuped.eu/images/docs/Definition_Massive_Open_Online_Courses.pdf

https://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/eli7081.pdf

http://degreeoffreedom.org/moocs-flipped-classroom/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qdKzSq_t8k8  https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/what-advantages-moocs-benefits-from-them-siyana-sokolova

http://www.newyorker.com/science/maria-konnikova/moocs-failure-solutions

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8geomS5ogsc

http://www.edtechmagazine.com/higher/article/2013/03/dark-side-mooc-do-challenges-outweigh-advantages

http://www.onlineuniversities.com/blog/2013/05/why-moocs-are-good-for-teacher-professional-development/

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bob-wise/mooceds-bring-professional_b_3991308.html

https://blog.kaltura.com/3-ways-moocs-benefit-teachers/

https://www.districtadministration.com/article/moocs-go-k12-higher-ed-trend-expands-high-schools

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Through out my journey of graduate school, I have encountered many new tools that I can implement into my own teaching.  MOOC may be one of those tools that can be used in the future if I were to teach older students, for instance high school students or adults.  I must say that I've gotten a lot better with online learning that at the beginning of my journey. My only experience with a MOOC is the course that I am currently enrolled in through Coursera. It is very easy to navigate and the pacing is adequate. It provides plenty of information that I know is reliable since the presenter is a professor. So far, it's been a great experience.

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MOOC is making its way to K-12 educational settings. Although it is fairly new, MOOC is starting to be offered in high school to students who wish to take classes that are not offered within their schools. Students are given high school credit upon completion of the course, but receive no grade. It also appears on their transcript. Looks like MOOC's are making their way into K-12 school settings.

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Through out the research of MOOC, many teacher benefits were found.  Three benefits that stood out were:
1. Allows professors to rethink their course.
2. Encourage teachers to become TECH savy.
3. MOOC's provide analytics that improve learning.

The following blogs outlines these benefits with a more detailed explanation of each.

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MOOC-Eds Bring Professional Development into the 21st Century!

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MOOC-Eds Bring Professional Development into the 21st Century!

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MOOC-Eds is designed for educators to use and continue their education about any topic in which they feel they may need extra support in.  I absolutely loved reading this article because it allows teachers to further their knowledge or research any strategies that may help bring success to their students.

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In a time of financial cutbacks, schools and districts have slashed professional development budgets at an alarming rate despite new education standards and assessments and increased demands on teachers and students. Instead of waiting with crossed fingers for a full economic recovery that will restore budgets, innovators in the education field are exploring new ways to meet the professional development needs of teachers in an economical way. Enter the Massive Open Online Course for Educators, or MOOC-Ed. The MOOC-Ed is an online course for educators that provides personalized, scalable, and flexible learning to improve teaching and student outcomes.

The buzzword "MOOC" is already loaded. Students, educators, and education pundits hold different views on the extremely popular new approach to digital learning that, in the cases of many colleges and universities, provides course credits to students. Many of these views are negative, citing a lack of definitive research on the effectiveness of MOOCs improving student learning and outcomes. This is true; MOOCs are relatively new inventions for student courses, and while I strongly believe they have the potential to help bridge achievement gaps and income disparities for students, conclusive research to support this doesn't yet exist. While the debate continues around the effectiveness of MOOCs for student learning, I want to focus on a different kind of MOOC -- one designed for educators as a cost-effective way to deliver quality professional development and help educators continue their education.

My organization, the Alliance for Excellent Education (the Alliance), paired up with the Friday Institute for Educational Innovation at North Carolina State University (the Friday Institute) earlier this year, to offer the first-ever MOOC-Ed -- Digital Learning Transition -- geared toward school, district, and teacher leaders. In creating, monitoring, and engaging with participants in the course, we learned a few things about what makes MOOC-Eds successful and necessary for professional development in the twenty-first century. Based on those lessons learned, we've improved the MOOC-Ed and are running it again this fall. Registration is open here. The MOOC-Ed is free and open to the public.

MOOC-Eds offer self-directed learning with content that can be tailored and personalized to an educator's specific goals. Think of a MOOC-Ed like a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure book. The MOOC-Ed creators aggregate resources and tailor them for any type of participant, e.g., a school administrator may choose to watch videos and read articles on districts that have been successful with digital learning, while a teacher leader may focus on using data to more effectively personalize instruction. In this way, the courses are self-directed, and participants choose among a rich array of resources, and decide when and how to engage in projects and discussions that will further their own goals.

MOOC-Eds are peer supported, meaning that participants learn from each other through engagement in online discussions, peer reviews of projects, ratings of posted ideas, and sharing of recommended resources. Educators in the Alliance and Friday Institute's MOOC-Ed reported that a significant portion of what they took away from the course came from support and ideas from other educators.

In a MOOC-Ed, educators engage in project-based learning that guides them through creating plans for their own district, school, or classroom. This helps ensure that unlike the traditional lecture model of professional development that rarely leads to significant change in teaching or learning, educators leave the MOOC-Ed with plans in place, many of which are implemented throughout the course.

The Alliance and Friday Institute's MOOC-Ed uses a case-study approach to introduce educators to real-world examples of best practices. Profiled schools and districts join the conversation to answer questions from participants and elaborate on the lessons they learned.

Finally, MOOC-Eds offer anytime, anywhere learning. Educators engage in the course as their time allows and from anywhere they have access to the web via a computer, tablet, or smartphone.

The MOOC-Ed offered by the Alliance and the Friday Institute drew 2,665 participants who represented all fifty states, the District of Columbia, and sixty-eight countries. Participants ranged from district administrators to instructional technology professionals, classroom teachers, education consultants, school administrators, library and media specialists, and educators in special education. If you were unable to participate in the first MOOC-Ed, I highly encourage you to register for the one running this fall.

Educators are seeking ways to continue learning and improve teaching techniques and administrative leadership. MOOC-Eds provide professional development opportunities at a fraction of the cost of traditional methods, while allowing for personalized and flexible paths to learning.
The next Alliance for Excellent Education MOOC-Ed, conducted in conjunction with the Friday Institute, begins on Sept. 30. Registration is open at https://courses.mooc-ed.org/dlt2. The MOOC-Ed is free and open to the public.

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MOOC-Eds Bring Professional Development Into the 21st Century

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In a time of financial cutbacks, schools and districts have slashed professional development budgets at an alarming rate despite new education standards and assessments and increased demands on teachers and students. Instead of waiting with crossed fingers for a full economic recovery that will restore budgets, innovators in the education field are exploring new ways to meet the professional development needs of teachers in an economical way.

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MOOC's and Teacher Professional Development

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MOOC's and Teacher Professional Development

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MOOC's are now being used by teachers to further their knowledge or keep up to date with teaching. The following article list and explains some of the benefits of using MOOC for professional development.

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While I am not a huge fan of MOOCs (see " MOOCs - The Opium of the Masses") I think that there is one area in which they might actually be extremely useful - ongoing teacher professional development (PD). They are a good fit to help meet a very specific need, which they could do quite well given teachers' experience with education.

There are several factors that make MOOCs a perfect option for ongoing teacher PD. First, they are free, and schools are so strapped for funding that free anything is quite possibly the only option in many cases. In most states teachers are required to add to their learning annually in order to maintain certification. MOOCs provide an easy way to continually find updated content. MOOCs are generally flexible enough in their scheduling to fit in with teacher's busy lives. Finally, the availability of the free content and resources found in some MOOCs could provide teachers with additional resources for teaching in their classrooms.

While this plan places the entire burden for PD on teachers, without consideration for release time, it does reflect the way that the system currently works and the lack of real value that we place on teachers' time and efforts. While that is unfair, it does reflect the reality in which we live and provides a real solution to an important problem.

The Need for Ongoing Teacher Professional Development
Teacher professional development represents a conundrum that perfectly encapsulates the systematic problem with education that we have as a society. We expect teachers to not only be well trained initially, but to also be responsible for continually renewing their knowledge and skills and developing new ones, with little to no institutional, financial, or societal support for the effort required to maintain their credentials. Teachers are expected to nearly continuously take classes or attend trainings that will enhance their ability to do their job, yet we never acknowledge the effort or take any solid measures to support it - little to no financial support and no releases time to do the work. But there is a real need for teachers to keep up with the rapid pace of educational innovations and technologies for learning, as well as changes in primary content areas. Two huge obstacles of cost and time stand like daunting sentinels between teachers and fulfilling their ongoing professional development needs. MOOCs could provide one possible solution to this problem. Here's how.

How MOOCs Can Help with Teacher Professional Development
Professional development for teachers is a necessary but time and resource consuming proposal that, when done poorly, can be essentially worthless, but when done well, can improve teaching, learning, and help prolong careers in a profession where burnout is a real issue. There are several ways in which MOOCs can actually provide an almost ideal medium for professional development.

Free - One of the key components of most current MOOC courses is that they are offered for free or at a nominal fee. Given the budgetary woes of our educational system, providing no or low-cost options for professional development is a dream come true for most administrators and schools boards.

Flexible - One of the most important features of online education is that it provides flexibility, both in time and location, for those participating in it. Nowhere is this more important than for teachers' continuing training. Most teachers work long days then spend much of their time away from school to plan and grade. This makes finding time for professional development a challenge for most. Summers are one option, as is the on-demand nature of MOOC-based learning.

Adaptable - Not only do MOOCs provide flexibility, in many cases, the content that they provide is also adaptable to different circumstances. edX and Coursera are two prime example of free content that is available to be modified and remixed in different ways to meet the specific needs of a particular audience. This feature allows those responsible for managing professional development for teachers to customize the experience for their audience.

Ongoing - Just like any kind of training or learning, the results don't stick in a one-shot situation. Learning needs to be reinforced over a long period of time and teachers need to have an opportunity to practice, implement, ask questions, try again, and integrate new skills and information on a schedule that works for them and allows them to remember the information. MOOCs, if designed with this strategy in mind, have enormous potential to meet this need. The on-demand, 24/7 nature of MOOCs also provides teachers with a medium for discussing and sharing their PD challenges and triumphs with others in the field.

Useful as a Classroom Resource - In addition to being adaptable to individual needs, MOOC content is often available for teachers to adapt to their own teaching. This is the case with the content from Coursera and edX so far, and more content should be available as the model grows.

Teachers can Teach Themselves - Who better to be a self-motivated, self-directed learner than someone trained to educate others. Teachers, in my opinion, fit the bill as the best possible matches for MOOCs, in that they understand how learning works, they are motivated to keep their professional credentials active, and they are qualified to adjust the content and the process to meet their needs.

These are all excellent reasons to think that MOOCs are a potentially valid avenue to help teachers with their professional development needs, but the problem remains, how does a teacher in need of some online, MOOC-based learning, find the right class?

How to Find Useful MOOCs for Teachers
The first step in finding useful content for continuing professional development is to look at sites like Coursera, edX, Udacity, and Udemy to see what they offer. Don't forget to look beyond courses specifically designed for teacher education or professional development, but also focus on subject area classes.
As an example, a search of the Coursera site for the key word "teaching" returned the following results:

Art and Inquiry: Museum Teaching Strategies for Your Classroom - Museum of Modern Art

Foundations of Teaching and Learning - Commonwealth Education Trust

First Year Teaching - Success from the Start - New Teacher Center

Foundations of Teaching and Learning: Introduction to Student Assessment - Commonwealth Education Trust

The Brain-Targeted Teaching Model for 21st Century Schools - Johns Hopkins University

Udacity, in contrast, offers many courses on specific topics that could be of use to a K-12 professional either for continuing development or to adapt for their own classroom use. For example:

Introduction to Statistics

Introduction to Physics

Introduction to Psychology

Udemy offers courses in a variety of areas useful to educators such as:

Additionally, Udemy offers an entire category of courses specifically for those in or interested in education. Many of them do, however, charge a nominal fee. With all of the offerings available from these mainstream providers, the problem is less finding something interesting and relevant and more finding out if teachers can get credit towards their required professional development needs.

Getting Credit for a MOOC
With 50 states, and countless school districts, it is impossible to say with certainty that any individual reading this will be able to receive credit for a given course. Please be sure to check with your district office before undertaking any online courses to meet required professional development goals. Despite that warning, there is a real possibility that even if a district or state does not currently accept a specific MOOC course, it might in the very near future.

The MOOCification of teacher professional development has begun in earnest, with Coursera recently announcing several courses specifically designed for teacher professional development. Right now Coursera offers 13 classes specifically designed for teacher continuing education. Many of those were mentioned above, such as "The Brain-Targeted Teaching Model for 21st Century Schools." One thing is certain, if one MOOC provider tries something and has any success, the others will not be far behind in providing similar offerings. So be on the lookout, and in the meantime, talk to those responsible for professional development in your district and start the process moving for getting MOOCs approved for you and your colleagues. Not only are you likely to learn something, you may also simplify the process of keeping your certification up-to-date.

Follow Justin on Google+ and Twitter.

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Why MOOCs are Good for Teacher Professional Development! - OnlineUniversities.com

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While I am not a huge fan of MOOCs (see "MOOCs - The Opium of the Masses") I think that there is one area in which they might actually be extremely useful - ongoing teacher professional development (PD). They are a good fit to help meet a very specific need, which they could do quite ...

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Dark side of the MOOC: Do the challenges outweigh the advantages?

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Dark side of the MOOC: Do the challenges outweigh the advantages?

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The following newsletter breaks down the components of a MOOC to see what the weaknesses are.

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Technology Solutions That Drive Education

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There are legitimate concerns surfacing about massive open online courses (MOOCs) as their popularity spreads far and wide. One of the main concerns is student engagement. Limited data exists on MOOCs, but of the information available, pass rates have been low and dropout rates have been high. This is obviously a concern and a thorn in the side of the MOOC community. The online news site Knowledge@Wharton recently featured an interview with Coursera co-founder Daphne Koller, in which she was asked about "participation, completion and dropout rates of this online population."

This is what we see: Enrolling is easy. It's a matter of just clicking a button, and it's free. A lot of students do that. Then when it comes time for the course to actually begin, about 70% of students show up, possibly because those who do not attend have found their life has moved on, and they're now busy doing something else.

Of the ones who show up, we see a bifurcation of the population. There are students who come in and they are primarily there to watch the videos. Of those who start watching videos, about 30% to 40% watch the course to its completion, with a fairly constant drop off rate week-on-week as students get busy.

Then there is the second population: These are students who really do intend to take the course for real. We gauge that by seeing who submits the first assignment. If you submit the first assignment, you probably intend to take the class for real. The retention rate for this population is comparable: About 30% who start the first assignment will complete the last one.

In terms of what you might traditionally call "retention" -- that would be the number of students who submit the final assignment relative to the population who initially enrolled for the course. In those terms, we have a retention rate of 7% to 9%, depending on the course. But that's really the wrong way of looking at it because many of these students never really intended to seriously take the class in the first place.

Read MOOCs on the Move: How Coursera Is Disrupting the Traditional Classroom.

The infographic below breaks down each of the four parts of a MOOC - massive, open, online, course - to see where the weaknesses are in this model.
This infographic originally appeared in Online Colleges.

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Dark Side of the MOOC: Do the Challenges Outweigh the Advantages?

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There are legitimate concerns surfacing about massive open online courses (MOOCs) as their popularity spreads far and wide. One of the main concerns is student engagement. Limited data exists on MOOCs, but of the information available, pass rates have been low and dropout rates have been high.

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This video provides an explanation of how a MOOC works and how students can get the most of these courses.

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For more videos, visit us on http://www.potential.com In this video, Our Community Relations Manager Monika Papadopoulou tells us about MOOC. MOOC refers to (Massive Open Online Course) is an online course that is available to a set of learners via the internet.

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Although MOOC seem to work well for many students because it provides so many benefits, there are a few downsides of a MOOC. The following article explains some of its disadvantages.

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On July 23rd, 1969, Geoffrey Crowther addressed the inaugural meeting of the Open University, a British institution that had just been created to provide an alternative to traditional higher education. Courses would be conducted by mail and live radio. The basic mission, Crowther declared, was a simple one: to be open to people from all walks of life. "The first, and most urgent task before us is to cater for the many thousands of people, fully capable of a higher education, who, for one reason or another, do not get it, or do not get as much of it as they can turn to advantage, or as they discover, sometimes too late, that they need," he told his audience. "Men and women drop out through failures in the system," he continued, "through disadvantages of their environment, through mistakes of their own judgment, through sheer bad luck. These are our primary material." He then invoked the message emblazoned on the Statue of Liberty: Open University wanted the tired, the poor, the huddled masses. To them, most of all, it opened its doors.

The mission Crowther described is the same one that has driven the proliferation of massive open online courses, or , during the past few years. (Open University has often served as a sort of inspirational model for such ventures, which Nathan Heller wrote about last year in the magazine.) The premise of the MOOC movement is as commendable as it is democratic: quality education should not be a luxury good. MOOCs are flexible and they can be free; if people want an education, MOOC s can give it to them.

MOOCs started with a bang of optimism. In 2011, Sebastian Thrun, a star professor at Stanford, made his introductory course on artificial intelligence available via an online broadcast. Within three months, he garnered over a hundred and sixty thousand viewers. Soon after, he started Udacity, one of the largest MOOC platforms. Other platforms that have sprung up in recent years include edX, which was developed through a collaboration between Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Coursera, which was co-founded by two of Thrun's colleagues at Stanford; and Khan Academy, the brainchild of the former hedge-fund analyst Salman Khan. Overseas, there are ventures like iversity and FutureLearn. And the number of available classes has been growing at an impressive pace. This month, there are four hundred and ninety-five MOOCs listed as in-progress on the MOOC aggregator Class Central, five times as many as there were a year ago.

And yet, despite the steady spread of the MOOC movement and the growing acceptance among university administrators that quality online education doesn't have to be an oxymoron, enthusiasm for MOOCs has waned in the past year. Last winter, Thrun himself expressed some doubts. "We were on the front pages of newspapers and magazines, and at the same time, I was realizing, we don't educate people as others wished, or as I wished," he told Fast Company_ in an interview. "We have a lousy product." (He later told the Times _that his enthusiasm had not actually declined as much as he might have indicated.)

On one hand, MOOCs have achieved some worthy goals: they make top educational resources available, for free or for very low prices, to people who wouldn't have access to them otherwise, including older populations, people with unpredictable schedules, and international audiences. And the quality of the education they offer can be quite high: the Open University, for instance, which began to offer online courses in the nineties, has consistently ranked among the top universities in the U.K. in measures of student satisfaction.

On the other hand, there are the numbers that gave Thrun pause. MOOC enrollment has soared, but completion rates are abysmal. According to a 2013 study, an average of only five per cent of the students in seventeen Coursera classes offered through the University of Pennsylvania actually finished their classes. Other estimated completion rates hover below thirteen per cent. And not all of the students who completed their courses necessarily passed.

The problem with MOOCs begins with the fact that, as their name says, they're massive and open, which means that it can be easy to get lost in them. There are tens or even hundreds of thousands of students in some classes. Often, the students receive no personal acknowledgment or contact to hold them to account. And they can generally drop out the second they're unhappy, frustrated, or overwhelmed. The datasuggest, in fact, that the students who succeed in the MOOC environment are those who don't particularly need MOOC s in the first place: they are the self-motivated, self-directed, and independent individuals who would push to succeed anywhere.

Last year, a team from the University of Pennsylvania, led by Gayle Christensen, found that the majority of the people enrolled in thirty-two of the courses offered through Penn's Coursera platform were young, already well educated, from developed countries, and, for the most part, employed-precisely the traditional students that Crowther held in contrast to the Open University's target demographic. And most of the students weren't taking classes in order to gain an essential education that they wouldn't receive otherwise; predominantly, they said they had enrolled to satisfy curiosity or advance in a current job-both of which are worthy pursuits, to be sure, but they are not the main needs that MOOC s were created to meet.

Earlier this year, an M.I.T. post-doctoral researcher named Jennifer DeBoer analyzed student data from an M.I.T. class offered through the edX platform to see if there were any factors that predicted success in the class. When she and her colleagues looked at over seven thousand responses to an exit survey, they found that the students who did the best were the ones who came in with prior education, had the highest intellectual starting points, and collaborated outside of class. In other words, those who succeeded in the MOOC were those who had already succeeded academically.

A 2013 analysis of an ambitious project launched by San Jose State University in collaboration with Udacity showed similar patterns. The program was the first step of a planned push to incorporate online learning into the California's public-university system. It was open to would-be college students as well as those who were already enrolled. The analysis found students who had already matriculated performed notably better than those who hadn't. While overall pass rates were quite low-an average of thirty-three per cent across the three courses in the sample-those who performed the worst were the students who were not already enrolled at the university. In a remedial algebra course, for instance, only a quarter of the students passed, and less than one fifth of the non-matriculated students were among them. To put it in absolute terms, out of eighty-one students in the course, only twenty passed and only six of those were non-matriculated students. As the authors of the report acknowledged, the rates were disappointingly low. The project was suspended for reassessment.

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On July 23rd, 1969, Geoffrey Crowther addressed the inaugural meeting of the Open University, a British institution that had just been created to provide an alternative to traditional higher education. Courses would be conducted by mail and live radio. The basic mission, Crowther declared, was a simple one: to be open to people from all walks of life.

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There are many advantages for students participating in a MOOC course. The following website list some of the many advantages.

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Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are internet-based courses, free of charge, that have incredibly large numbers of students. In a typical MOOC has specific start and end dates, a more-or-less defined topic of study, facilitator/s, and assessments. Students watch short video lectures online and complete the assignments that are graded either automatically or by peers.

Some of the biggest MOOC platforms are:

As an ardent, lifelong learner, I have completed more than a dozen MOOC courses and have signed up for a couple of new ones starting next year. I've been asked not once or twice what's the point of taking those classes and if I get any benefits from that. Here I have tried to summarize the advantages and benefits of MOOCs. Probably I'll help you expand your curiosity about this amazing opportunity to gain new knowledge anywhere, anytime, anyplace!

1. MOOCs bring people together from all over the world and encourage engagement between staff and students of a given university/ institution to interact with the wider public.

2. MOOCs keep the competitive edge. Offering diverse classes on different topics makes it easy for learners to keep up with the latest news and trends and be on top of their professional field.

3. Learning at your own pace, following your own schedule. Some of the courses have deadlines for tests and assessments, but they are easy to keep. Usually one have weeks to finish the quizzes and it is not seldom the case that learners the option to finish a course whenever they feel like it, whenever they have the time. In other words learning happens in a more informal setting, at a place of your convenience and often around your own schedule

4. Choose your language! A lot of MOOC classes are offered in different languages! It doesn't matter if you speak English, Chinese, French or Arabic. Subtitles are available for hundreds of courses and they are just a click away.

5. Anyone can sign up for a MOOC class. You don't need a degree or previous knowledge to follow a course, only the willingness to learn.

6. No distance constraints. You want to take free courses offered by universities from Germany, USA, China, and Austria? No problem! Just browse the offerings on the topics you are interested in!

7. Offering interesting business opportunities. Several new MOOC companies launched in 2012: edX by Harvard and MIT; Coursera, a Standford company; and Udacity, which focuses on science and tech.

8. Making classes more attractive and more meaningful. MOOCs have great potential to expand knowledge and perspectives

9. Distributed learning. Participants help each other interpret the material, seek out different or related sources, and use social networking to share their interpretations. Through this distributed learning, participants gain a better understanding of the material and can get immediate feedback if questions arise.

So, are you ready to sign up for a MOOC?

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Siyana Sokolova is working as Mentee coordinator at Mitt Liv AB (svb), Gothenburg, Sweden. She has professional background in International relations and diverse interests in diversity and inclusion, social media and international affairs. Passionate for visual storytelling and photography.

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What are the advantages of MOOCs and how can you benefit from them?

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Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are internet-based courses, free of charge, that have incredibly large numbers of students. In a typical MOOC has specific start and end dates, a more-or-less defined topic of study, facilitator/s, and assessments.

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The following video gives a detailed description of what is a flipped classroom and its advantages.

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Can MOOC be integrated into "flipped classrooms"?

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Can MOOC be integrated into "flipped classrooms"?

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MOOC are a great tool to use for flipped classrooms because an instructor can focus class time on teaching and engaging students in meaningful discussions/activities.

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I suddenly remembered that piece I wanted to write before getting into the whole backlash backlash last week. So with Thanksgiving break looming, time to take a look at the latest role MOOC makers are hoping their programs will play: supporting the flipping of the classroom.

For the few of you reading this who aren't familiar with the term, the "flipped classroom" refers to a method of instruction that reverses the typical order in which students listen to lectures while at class and then work on homework elsewhere with a new model that has them watch lectures on video in their homes or dorms, freeing class time for discussion and projects that involve more interactivity between teachers and students.

"Flipping" got a big boost a few years back when the concept was embraced by Salman Khan who proposed it as a strategy for making effective use of the short video lectures in his growing Khan Academy library, videos that have been finding a home at various points in the learning process.

If the notion of using class time to do something other than listen a teacher talk sounds familiar, that's because most of the classes all of us took from kindergarten through most of high school involved using class time to do more than sit while a sagely teacher instructed us from behind a lectern. But as those high school years ended and college began, those teachers were replaced by professors, many of whom had dedicated much of their adult lives to being able to stand before a rapt crowd of students dispensing knowledge and wisdom accumulated during years spent as malnourished graduate students.

In fact, some of the professors who love lecturing the most are the very ones attracted to teaching massive open courses which give them an even bigger audience to speak to. Which highlights one of the first challenges facing classroom flippers: how to get professors who love (and are used to) being the focus of attention to instead dedicate class time to doing something else.

This transition is probably easiest for a professor flipping his or her own class since this simply involves moving their personal voice from one part of a course to another. But once you start talking about MOOCs as a content source for flipped classrooms, professors (like those in the philosophy department at San Diego State) will legitimately start wondering what their role is supposed to be if Michael Sandel or some other Ivy League hotshot is given the job of delivering the bulk of course content via videos the flipped professors had no involvement in creating.

Now as I learned when talking to a group of community college professors who I mistakenly thought would be hostile to the whole MOOC thing, many teachers are already eagerly experimenting with how to integrate third-party content into their classes, and whole disciplines (like computing) have already transitioned to a point where rote learning at home coupled with hands-on work in class is the norm. So presuming that MOOCs are just one of many content sources that can be leveraged by professors experimenting with their teaching strategies, they could serve as a valuable resource as more and more classes get re-engineered.

But here we run into a second challenge for the flipping strategy: figuring out what creative exercises, group projects and other activities are supposed to fill up all the free time that's been created by moving the lecture component of a course outside the classroom. No doubt there are some professors who have been dying to triple or quadruple the amount of time spent in discussion with their students. And it wouldn't surprise me to discover that a decent number of entrepreneurial teachers are creating and sharing interesting classroom exercises and similar content to liven up the flipped course experience. But in order for any educational transformation to grow beyond acceptance by atypical early adopters, there needs to be an infrastructure to support teachers/professors who are already teaching perfectly fine classes, a set of resources and encouraging models that gives them an incentive to try something that might work even better.

There's also the chance that, as good as the flipped classroom model could be in many situations, it might not be suitable for all (or even most) subjects, teachers or students. In which case, we need treat current efforts to encourage this type of teaching as just another set of experiments and be willing to accept (and learn from) the results we get when the flipped classroom model is put to the test in the real world.

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MOOCs and the Flipped Classroom - Degree of Freedom

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I suddenly remembered that piece I wanted to write before getting into the whole backlash backlash last week. So with Thanksgiving break looming, time to take a look at the latest role MOOC makers are hoping their programs will play: supporting the flipping of the classroom.

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Flipped classrooms is a pedagogical model which reverses the order of lectures and homework. In this frame, short video lectures are viewed at home by students and class time is designated to projects and discussions to further expand on student learning.

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The following article provides a detailed description of what is a MOOC.

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"Imagine taking a course from on the greatest thinkers..."

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"Imagine taking a course from on the greatest thinkers..."

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It is an online course available to anybody around the world to further education at no cost. All that is needed is access to the World Wide Web.

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Technology has become an essential element within our school systems.

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Vianca Maldonado