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Coursera To Offer K-12 Teacher Development Courses
An anonymous reader writes "Coursera on Wednesday announced it has partnered with 12 top professional development programs and schools of education to open up training and development courses to teachers worldwide. The massive open online course (MOOC) provider is expanding beyond university courses by offering 28 teaching courses for free, with more to come. It’s worth noting that this is the first time Coursera is partnering with non-degree-bearing institutions. It’s also Coursera’s first foray into early childhood and K-12-level education. The company clearly sees this as a necessary step if it wants to go beyond just students and address the other side of the expensive education equation."
The problem with modern education is its not about knowledge, the answer to virtually any question is simply a Google away, instead its about qualification. Part of qualification is this idea that is still stuck in most of the older generation's mind that you "get what you pay for" and so even though something free might be really good, they believe that it is, by definition, inferior to a paid product. You see this all the time with antivirus software, someone buying a $20 product that is inferior to free stuff like AVG but insisting that their computer is better protected just because they "paid for it".
While its always nice to see information becoming more free, I doubt that it will really revolutionize anything until we have a shift in perspective and those in charge realize that free can often be better than paid.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
We're really living in amazing times.
Most online courses to date have been lacking in one aspect or another, most notably student interest - drop rates of over 95% are common. Teething pains probably, as teachers begin to recognize that a) courses online must be presented in a different way, and b) teaching techniques must be effective (in terms of keeping student interest) when the audience is not captive.
Recently I saw this gem, which is extremely good. Good presentation, good technical quality (web form scoring &c), good content, and some experimental techniques in keeping student interest.
While I don't like the techniques used for keeping student interest in this course, they are at least experimenting with new techniques and learning from past mistakes. The quality keeps getting better.
Their business model varies, but one site hopes to provide an MBA ensemble for $50 (Udacity) and another gets finders fees from companies that hire the top scorers (edX). And of course there's Kahn academy, which is turning high-school education upside down.
In a couple of years, you will probably be able to get a complete high-quality education by self-study over the internet for thin money. You'll be able to study as much as you want for whatever topic you want and for as long as you want.
No more massive student loans just to get a decent education.
Another example of a moribund business model being overtaken by new technology.
Amazing times indeed.
Education has come a long way from the traditional class room experience.
The thing about classroom experience is that the teacher has the hard job of not only having to present material, but keep the students engaged with it.
Want to be an astronaut? well, you need your ABCs, 1,2,3s.. and so on and so forth.
All this new online stuff is great!
But without motivation, very few people on this planet, just learn for the sake of learning..
And I think that it really boils down to this.
Motivation.
How do you instill motivation in kids so that they can be sold on the idea that the more they learn today, the better the choices they can make in their future for a better life.
Here is their company blog post with a partial list of courses.
http://blog.coursera.org/post/49331574337/coursera-announces-professional-development-courses-to
Do you have a HOSTS file that can save me from all this HOSTS file spam?
The accreditation thing is important for the entities you wish to impress for reasons of influencing them to give you the monies later on.
But I sure hope it does work out, so that folks can start avoiding the ridiculous costs of tuition these days. Competition needs to enter the tuition market and disrupt the steady ridiculous increases.
Open online courses in educational methods are a great step in the right direction. My big concern is math education in the US: I have 2 kids in middle & high school, and one of the huge peeves has been that many parents have been driven to home education for basic math thru algebra, out of frustration with poor performance of "Discovery" and "Connected" math programs (aka Chicago Univ methods). I'm not a hater of the programs per se, just the results. Apparently these programs are pretty good at keeping low-performing and low-aptitude students involved and learning, and are quite popular with school systems facing NCLB cut-offs. But for kids with a high aptitude and good applied sense of math? The results are terrible: Kids consistently describe the program content as repetitive and boring (because moving ahead out-of-pace creates great difficulty for the teacher) while the structure is confusing (kids who are adept at the math still find the topic progression confusing). It's as if they decided to teach math topics like a 'round' in music class, and anyone out of phase gets squashed. As a result math teachers routinely use high-performers to tutor others or send them off to do unrelated schoolwork rather than skip ahead. This yet-another-new-math is a hot mess, but it's financially attractive for struggling districts.
What to do? Personally we've been collaborating locally with other parents to supplement the math course with better materials and homegrown syllabi with a more linear progression through math and algebra topics. We've also leaned heavily on crowdsourced materials, Khan Academy being the largest. Not only does this make it easier for kids to progress logically and smoothly through the material, but also gives kids a sense of control/ownership and interest in the material. (Nothing so pissed me off as how much the Chicago program kills enthusiasm for learning: "I'm good at this, but screw this homework - it's the third time we've done this topic.") But tutoring and homegrown programs are a *lot* of work, and inevitably fall down in some areas. I wish the public educational system could improve to handle it, but most teachers don't have good methods or support to improve from within.
Open coursework for educators can help in two ways:
1. Teach the teachers better. If US schools are going to continue to adopt a mediocre math program, at least the teachers should teach it right. Causes of the woes above, after the lousy program itself, include poor education of teachers on how to deliver the program. Without firm understanding, even good teachers can't deliver the material well, and excellent teachers are not prepared to bend and adapt the material to fit their students. To wit: If an apprentice needs a 28oz framing hammer and you give him a Fubar(tm), he'll probably keep bashing nails in but you've got so show him which part was intended as a hammer. If you tell the journeyman that part of the tool was hardened for use as a hammer, he'll probably use it correctly and might even reach good performance (even if making a 48oz do-10-jobs-but-none-of-them-well tool made additional work for him)
2. Give teachers more tools to contribute to open courseware content. This is a good step in the direction to support open course content, and an environment where curriculum can live and die by its performance -- not by the quixotic whims of the biggest textbook buyer. This has far wider reach than just my personal math concerns. The potential is really great.
I think not...(*poof*)
I think all teachers should take courses. If it were up to me every two years a grade school teacher would have to take tests which incompass's everything from K to 12 and if they get less then 90% they are fired instantly, with a chance for a redo only after 6 month.
Your automated posting system is slipping... there's an entire on-topic discussion thread above this!
MOOC is great, don't get me wrong. But the problem with it, as I see it, is if everybody learns the material in the exact same way, it limits a societies problem solving abilities because everyone then uses identical problem solving approaches. Richard Feynman found that he had an advantage over his colleagues in some instances by having knowledge of a different set of tools. So as long as MOOC doesn't wind up becoming "Everything 101" but rather becomes a diverse set of courses allowing many choices by students, then it will have a chance of becoming highly successful.
That was the turning point of my life--I went from negative zero to positive zero.
I think the key to getting accreditation for education is the separation of teaching from testing. They should be completely independent. Many higher level programs operate this way. You can learn in any way you want from private tutors to full university classes, but everyone takes the same tests and is held to the same high standard. I could go on and on about this but I'm sure many out there who have learned under this kind of system will agree that it's superior to the high school/university style of teaching, where teacher's are far more interested in testing students than actually teaching them anything.
One of the requirements of teaching classes in accredited education programs is that there's almost an apprenticeship aspect to it. Starting in sophomore level classes, prospective education majors are sent into the field for observations. This is followed up by mentoring and assisting a teacher directly, and then finally by a full semester of student teaching as a partner to the teacher in their senior year.
I just don't see how Coursera can replace that experience, which is what actually makes or breaks many education majors.
I think they also realized this, which is why they're starting out with continuing education and staff development. (Students don't need student teaching if they're already managing a classroom on their own.)
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
The MIT circuit design course was like drinking from a firehose, i.e. MIT-pace. You have to be motivated to keep up and spend lots of time on it. I took it as a MIT student and the surrounding college environment helped a lot with self-discipline. Most of Cousera's courses will not be as intense as this, but they are still college-level courses.
According to Twain: THose who can do, those who can't teach.
But what about those who teach the teachers?
Not sure if it is the right tool for your kids, but take a look at artofproblemsolving.com - I was lucky enough to benefit from some amazing teachers early on and throughout school, but when I came across them while running a math contest, I came to the conclusion that I really wish they had existed when I was younger. Khan is great for remediation, but AoPS is designed to push the advanced kids to strengthen their foundations and explore all the things left out of the normal K-12 curriculum.
A bit OT, but how are you supposed to pronounce Coursera? Course Ra or Cours Era?
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
You fail it, Paul. Your skill is not enough.