Introduction to Massive Open Online Courses for Teenagers: A proposal to help students complete a MOOC with their friends

and with the guidance of a face-to-face teacher.

The concept of the Introduction to MOOCs for teenagers has been curated by Steve McCrea This document should be in the public domain. National Public Radio aired an interesting topic (MOOC) and the contents of the transcript are copyrighted. I'm posting the document here and I hope that it will be considered a fair educational use. I am not seeking to profit from the posting of this document. I just want to see this information in use

========= Create a course in high school to support teenagers who want to take a Massive Open Online Course (Open = Free).

Introduction to MOOCs a proposed course for teenagers

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This is an email message to the principals in high schools that I respect.

(targeted especially at Diane Grondin in Amelia Academy and Enrique Gonzalez in California)

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The transcript below is from NPR ... it is about a MOOC ... I'm very interested in seeing teenagers collaborate and get

through as a group. It would be a notch in their resume/transcript.

I can see summer camps evolving courses that would be timed to take place during a MOOC... and the goal would be to get the course completed, even if it means registering one person and having a team of three getting through it... or have each student register but they can help each other get the answers ... but they need to submit original responses. The idea of the course is to get teens used to working online -which can be VERY intimidating to teenagers who are used to the guided support of a teacher. =====

I'm sending you this information with the following suggestion: consider creating a course or project that is timed to take place during a MOOC -- a fully guided instruction about how to work online ... I can imagine that each student who completes a course on coursera.org will have a special feeling of pride in their accomplishment, even if they completed the course with the aid of their teammates

and coaching by a face-to-face teacher.

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I think MOOCs are pretty intimidating. There is a high level of independence and initiative that most have... I've signed up for three of them and abandoned them after two or three attempts. There are log-on issues, the need to do a LOT of reading, ... it looks lonely for most teenagers to participate in ... but what if they could work with friends at school (during high school) and with the guidance of a high school teacher?

Here is the transcript http://www.npr.org/2012/11/24/165806787/math-en-masse-teaching-online-for-free

Copyright 2012 National Public Radio. For personal, noncommercial use only. See Terms of Use. For other uses, prior permission required.
SCOTT SIMON, HOST: A number of elite universities across the country, including Harvard, Stanford and MIT, have started offering some of their most popular courses online and free of charge. These MOOCs, as they're known, or massive open online courses, are available to hundreds of thousands of people at a time all around the world. And our math guy, Stanford University professor Keith Devlin, has recently finished teaching one. He joins us now.

Keith, your first MOOC, what was the course? How many students? KEITH DEVLIN, BYLINE: So it was called Introduction to Mathematical Thinking. And it's the course that's typically taught for students entering university intending to major in mathematics or physics or computer science. And it's what's known as a transition course. it takes them from high school mathematics to beginning university level mathematics, which is a difficult transition because the nature of mathematics changes between what's done at high school and what's done at university. SIMON: Keith, I understand there were 64,000 people who were logged in. What is it like to teach a class with 64,000? DEVLIN: It was a wild ride. I mean, first of all, it was a huge amount of work to put it together in the first place, because everything has to be planned in great detail. And yet you need to retain the spontaneity of the classroom. But once it got going, it was wild. I mean, obviously you don't have any close interactions with 64,000 people. On the other hand, you've got a very close interaction with a single person, because you're interacting directly as if it's that one person sitting next to you. SIMON: Help us understand how it works. So a student logs on and... DEVLIN: Most of the time what the students see is me writing on a piece of paper. I tried to simulate what it would be like for a student to sit next to me in my office at my desk and just work through problems. It was all recorded as live. When I make a mistake, I simply erase and correct myself and go on, because I really wanted to let the students know what it would be like to sit next to a professional mathematician and work through some mathematics. So the star of the show - if it's a show - is my left hand writing on a piece of paper and scribbling mathematics and talking at the same time. SIMON: That'll be a Daniel Day-Lewis movie down the road, "Keith's Left Hand." (LAUGHTER) SIMON: And 64,000 people, and yet you can't see one of them fall asleep. That's amazing. DEVLIN: That's right. And that's kind of nice actually. You know, people actually focus on the technology and the videos and things, but that's really not what MOOCs are about. What MOOCs are about are creating learning communities. You know, people think that sort of YouTube lead to MOOCs. No. What led to MOOCs was Facebook, because Facebook made it acceptable to people around the world to interact on a very personal one-on-one level through social media. And what MOOCs are really about are building learning communities of people. Once it gets going, the students help each other. And my job is simply to create an environment in which they could interact and help each other. SIMON: We should mention, students get a certificate when they complete your course online, but the credits don't count toward the college degree, right?

DEVLIN: Correct. And I'm not allowed to put the Stanford logo on that certificate. SIMON: And I imagine educators all over the world at all different kinds of academic institutions have to be taking a look at this. Obviously, at a time when resources and costs are of a concern and when are they not, I suppose - this offers a hope of quality teachers reaching maximum number of students. DEVLIN: Oh, yeah. This is basically what - those of us are sort of these pioneers in these courses. This is what gives us goose bumps, because we think for the first time ever anybody in the world with a broadband access can actually have a sense, a virtual sense, of sitting next to a world expert somewhere at Stanford or MIT or Harvard or somewhere. And that's really kind of a unique situation. MOOCs are undoubtedly going to change the face of education in many ways. I don't see them eliminating physical universities. But a lot of the time at universities is sitting in a lecture room listening to someone give a lecture. You know, it's amazing that that survived the invention of the printing press, quite frankly, because lectures really were invented because that was the only way to get the material when manuscripts were hand copied. And yet, the lecture persevered. I think MOOCs are now going to knock the final nail in the coffin of the lecture, but what they're not going to do, I think, is knock the nail in the coffin of the seminar, the colloquium, where you sit around on the floor, or on chairs, or wherever, and talk to the experts and talk to each other. That, I think, is an essential element to that that's not going to go away. SIMON: Keith Devlin of Stanford University, our math guy, speaking with us from the campus of Stanford. DEVLIN: Bye-bye.

On Wed, Dec 5, 2012 at 7:15 AM, Steve McCrea <happymathteacher@gmail.com> wrote:

For Your information Apparently this MOOC system could be a new way of showing how much a student really understands... it would be a

performance of understanding... APPLICATION IN HIGH SCHOOL? Teams of students complete a MOOC course together... I wonder if it might be a teaching tool -- get a class of 24 students, put them in groups of 3 or 4 and let each group submit answers and attend the course as a group (four people submitting answers together). "I survived a MOOC" could be the tshirt at the end of the class. the experience would be a practice session. Many students would never complete another MOOC, but all would have part of the experience.

Part of the difficulty of participating in a MOOC is the commitment of time -- you don't complete the course simply by listening to lectures. You have to do independent work, study, interactive quizzes online... I've signed up for a MOOC but abandoned it because the time commitment was too much. But how cool would it have been to complete a MOOC with a team of colleagues, who could tell me what one of the lecturers meant or who could bring in a reading reference that

I had not done.

To prepare students for university and independent online work, I predict that high schools will start courses that involve partners working to complete the MOOC together, not to earn a certificate, but to learn collaboration and find out what it takes to be successful in online study. At language schools that are preparing students for entry into a university, an extended class exercise might be enrolling pairs of students in a MOOC and encouraging the students to work together to complete the online assignments... not for a certificate but for the experience of the online environment.

here's the article...

http://chronicle.com/article/Providers-of-Free-MOOCs-Now/136117/? cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

December 4, 2012

Providers of Free MOOC's Now Charge

Employers for Access to Student Data

Students and universities can opt out of Coursera's new employee-matching service. Andrew Ng, one of the founders of the company, describes the program as "a relatively uncontroversial business model that most of our university partners are excited about."

By Jeffrey R. Young Providers of free online courses are officially in the headhunting business, bringing in revenue by selling to employers information about high-performing students who might be a good fit for open jobs. On Tuesday, Coursera, which works with high-profile colleges to provide massive open online courses, or MOOC's, announced its employee-matching service, called Coursera Career Services. Some high-profile tech companies have already signed upincluding Facebook and Twitter, according to a post on Coursera's blog, though officials would not disclose how much employers pay for the service. Only students who opt into the service will be included in the system that participating employers see, a detail stressed in an e-mail message that Coursera sent to its nearly two million past or present students on Tuesday. Each college offering a course through Coursera is also given the chance to opt out of the servicemeaning that if a college declines, then no students in its courses can participate in the matchmaking system. "Some universities are still thinking it through, so not all have said yes," Andrew Ng, a co-founder of Coursera, said in an interview on Tuesday. "I don't think anyone said, 'No now and no in the future,'" he added. "This is a relatively uncontroversial business model that most of our university partners are excited about." Udacity, another company that provides free online courses, offers a similar service. Udacity works directly with professors to offer courses, rather than signing agreements with colleges.

Udacity's founder, Sebastian Thrun, said in an interview that 350 partner companies had signed up for its job program. While Mr. Thrun would not say how much employers pay, he characterized the fee as "significantly less than you'd pay for a headhunter, but significantly more than what you'd pay for access to LinkedIn," a popular social network for job hunters. "We're more like a headhunter," said Mr. Thrun. "We go through our database and find people that seem to be good matches for the openings from these companies." Udacity says companies using its job-matching program include Google, Amazon, Facebook, and several tech start-ups. In the case of one computer-science course offered through Udacity, the online students took the same quizzes and tests as a group of students enrolled at Stanford University at the same time. The top 411 students all came from the thousands of students who took the course online, with the strongestperforming Stanford student ranking 412th in the final standings, said Mr. Thrun. (That Stanford student earned a 98-percent score in the course.) "There are a huge number of people out there who are extremely skilled but happen not to have the Stanford degree," said Mr. Thrun.
How the Coursera Model Works

Coursera said that it had been quietly testing its career-services system for a few months, but that it was in place only for courses in software engineering. Other disciplines will be coming soon, though Mr. Ng would not say when. Here's how it works: A participating employer is given a list of students who meet its requirements, usually the best-performing students in a certain geographic area. If the company is interested in one of those students, then Coursera sends an e-mail to the student asking whether he or she would be interested in being introduced to that company. The company pays a flat fee to Coursera for each introduction, and the college offering the course gets a percentage of that revenue, typically between 6 and 15 percent. Mr. Ng noted that Coursera might try other types of matchmaking arrangements

in the future, depending on how well the current model works for students and employers. "Today everyone has access to an infinite source of rsums, so it's a timemanagement issue," said Mr. Ng. "The question is how many rsums you need to read to find a candidate you'd like to speak with. Students who complete and do well in [Coursera] classes have a very high chance of being interesting to employers." Dawn Smith is one student who found a job with the help of a Coursera course, though she did so before the company set up its matchmaking service. Ms. Smith wanted to change careers, so she took a pharmacology course offered through Coursera by a University of Pennsylvania professor. She completed the course meaning she scored at least 90 percent on homework and examinationsand got a certificate, which she listed on her rsum. And she mentioned the achievement during a recent interview with the University of Illinois Hospital and Health Sciences System Cancer Center, which ended up hiring her for a job in communications. "It sort of showed the initiative of wanting to continue my education," she said. She said that she would sign up for Coursera's new career services if she was looking for a job, but only if she knew that she was going to devote time to the class and had a good chance of doing well. "The biggest question mark," she said, "is if I do take up that offer and I found myself not able to complete this, how will that reflect to a potential employer?" With that type of reluctance in mind, Coursera gives students the option to show employers information about them only if they complete a given course. One Udacity student, Tamir Duberstein, said that company's job program had helped him land a gig at Square, a trendy company that lets consumers submit credit-card payments using smartphones and tablet computers. He was living in Toronto, working at a job he didn't enjoy, when he took a series of computer-

programming courses from Udacity, spending nearly all of his free time on them. "I got the best possible result in a few of them," he said. One day this past summer, Udacity sent him an e-mail asking whether he'd be interested in sending in his rsum as part of its job service. "Once your rsum is received, it will be prescreened and possibly shared with a few selected employers with your permission," the message said. He sent his in, but didn't expect much. "I was like, What the hell, sure, why not?," he remembers. A few weeks later, he heard first from one tech company and then from Square. Mr. Duberstein said that the job-interview process included plenty of technical questions asking him to prove he had the skills that he had learned in the Udacity courses. "The point here is not credentialing," he said. "They quizzed me. They really were assessing what I know for themselves."
Softer Skills

Both Coursera and Udacity show employers more than just student grades. They also highlight students who frequently help others in discussion forums. Mr. Thrun, of Udacity, said those "softer skills" are often more useful to employers than raw academic performance. "Problems are never solved in isolation in the real world," he said. He said that Udacity might share with an employer someone who has helped 90 to 100 people in discussion forums. "That specific skill has been a better predictor of placement success than academic performance," he added. Mr. Ng, of Coursera, reported a similar trend. And frequently the topperforming students also post the most valuable comments in student forums, as counted by how many students "vote up" a comment, or signal that it was helpful by clicking a thumbs-up button. "Students in the top 10 percent had twice as many up-voted posts in the student forums as the students not in the top 10 percent," he said.

Coursera has already made its first introductions, though it has not stated how many, or whether any led to a job. Mr. Ng said that the largest source of revenue will probably come from selling certificates, rather than such matching. So far the company has not charged for certificates, but it plans to start doing so in the coming months.

===== Outline of a unit Title: Introduction to MOOCs Also known as I survived a MOOC or I completed a MOOC Students would get a T-Shirt at the end of the course FEATURES 1. time at school and at home to log into the MOOC 2. Students can work in teams to find the answers to the MOOC questions 3. Enrollment can be individual. If a student decides not to enroll (some students might not want to be online daily), then that student can work with a partner and get a t-shirt I helped my friend survive a MOOC GOAL: Students will get first-hand knowledge of what a college-level course is like online without having to endure many of the hardships that many students experience in isolated, solitary, online courses ...

ADAPTATION FOR OFFLINE USE: The entire course might be downloaded and stored as videos for later use by high school students. The materials could be edited to give a preview to the I completed a MOOC course.

https://www.coursera.org/course/maththink

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The concept of the Introduction to MOOCs for teenagers has been curated by Steve McCrea Learn about BIB Penpals Building International Bridges with Skype and Facebook (safely) Recommended viewing: Katie Gimber's "Why I flipped my classroom" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9aGuLuipTwg

PHONE: +1 954 646 8246 Skype SteveEnglishTeacher facebook.com/GuideOnTheSide LectureLess.com GuideontheSide.com

TheEbookman@gmail.com NPR REFERENCE: http://www.npr.org/2012/11/24/165806787/math-en-masse-teaching-online-for-free

https://www.coursera.org/course/maththink find more courses http://online.stanford.edu/courses