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Microsoft Office Mix: No-Teacher-Left-Behind Course Authoring
theodp (442580) writes "While they aim to democratize learning, the Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) movement has, for the most part, oddly left K-12 teachers out of the online content creation business. ZDNet's Simon Bisson reports on Office Mix, Microsoft's new PowerPoint plug-in and associated cloud service, which Bisson says makes it easy to create and distribute compelling educational content (screenshots). GeekWire's Frank Catalano also makes an interesting case for why Office Mix's choice of PowerPoint, "the poster child for delivering boring presentations in non-interactive settings," could still be a disrupter in the online content creation space. By the way, MOOC.org, the collaboration of edX and Google which also aims to help "teachers easily build and host courses for the world to take," is slated to go live in the first half of 2014. It'll be interesting to see how MOOC.org's authoring tools differ from Google Research's Course Builder effort."
The only problem with PowerPoint is that anyone can use it, and most people aren't capable of making compelling content. I know some people who can do great things with PowerPoint, but just like any skill, it is only possessed by a small percent of the population. The average person can't sing, dance, cook, act, paint, draw, or code exceptionally well, either. It would be like blaming Word for an abundance of badly-formatted, boring stories.
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As an individual working in the corporate training field and currently working towards finishing my M.Ed, the largest problem I see with the OP's approach is that it's based on PowerPoint, the worst tool for learning. Learning doesn't happen by reading or listening to a presenter drone on - it happens by interacting with the facilitator, community, or materials. It looks like the "compelling educational content" means adding quizzes to a powerpoint. Not good enough, even if the educator does have great ideas for creating learning interactions.
Ever try doing math in PowerPoint?
We already have advanced, powerful, flexible learning management systems and promising new ones appearing all the time, e.g. Instructure Canvas. The better ones are easily good enough for most online learning and teaching needs and most learners and teachers only use a small percentage of the features on offer (some claim 80% using 20% of features). For all its sins, Moodle has been a pioneer in this respect and one that many are trying to emulate.
Then there's open educational resources (OER): Creative Commons licensed learning and teaching resources that anyone can download, edit, use, and redistribute with no strings attached except respectful attribution. UNESCO are leading a large co-ordinated effort to make this the new standard in education: http://www.unesco.org/new/en/c.... There are dozens of repositories of resources, worksheets, media, learning activities, and whole courses available today and the number is growing. Anyone can set up an installation of Moodle as a courseware "hub" from which other Moodle's can import learning content from. Here's Moodle.org's official hub: http://moodle.net/
So what are Microsoft and Google bringing to the table? What we already have plus PR, marketing, and wholly unethical blanket surveillance? Do they intend to "fudge" important issues and manipulate education systems to generate yet more revenue for themselves, regardless of any detrimental effects on learning outcomes? Remember that the people we're teaching today are the ones who have to take care of us and fix the messes we've created tomorrow. I'd like them to be smart, insightful, intuitive, creative, analytical and critical thinkers rather than the rather uninspiring products of common core standards and bureacractic mediocrity.
We can keep the teachers. Just leave the unions behind.
Sorry, but MOOC is hype...
Yes, there are serious, useful courses out there. However, these are the minority that actually have students submit work and get feedback on it. It is precisely the interaction with qualified instructors - emphasis on interaction - that makes a good course. Without interaction, you could just look at YouTube videos or go read a website (or a book). Which works fine for some people, but is not a MOOC.
The younger your students, the more important the interaction with the instructor. Someone complaining that elementary school teachers are missing the "MOOC movement"? First, there isn't a MOOC movement, only a MOOC bubble. And, second, they aren't missing anything, because MOOC is totally inappropriate for their students. /rant
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
I guess if you want to know absolutely everything you possibly can about the consumer you funnel there classwork to your data collectors too. "You want a piece of candy", is much more effective if you know what type of candy the kids like.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
Give a student Office 365 and they are prepared for a job, TEACH a student how to use computers and they will be prepared their whole career.
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Second, is the MOOC portion. To be honest, there is simply not a compelling case for this except in certain cases for K-12. We are not going to be setting 8 year old kids alone with a computer and expect them to learn. Maybe one day, but not with MS tools.
This initiative, however, will probably provide some value to MS and k-12 teachers. For the most part K-12 teachers know how use MS products. The presentations are in powerpoint, which is why they are generally useless, and the worksheets are in word, which is why they are ugly, and the one great part of MS Office, Excel, is so misused that even it does not survive the experience.However, these are the tools that teachers have and packaging them so that students can get experience learning on the computer is valuable.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
The first rule of business, adjective "ruthless" is redundant, is to create a captive market which is something both Micro$oft and Google are about. You do this so you can lock in your customers to your product or service and ask for ransom if they want to leave. The only reasonable answer is to either steal the product or create a workalike that makes the functionality non-unique. This is what Open-Office and LibreOffice represent WRT Microsoft Office and why Microsoft has to roll new releases each year. You get maybe 90% of the functioality in the workalikes but the market share is retained by human nature; people are afraid to drop their addiction to Word, nuch of that due to conservative business leadership than actual functional utility.
For a company whose motto, "Do no Evil." the situation of Google Docs is a disgrace. Not only is the product really a closed standard, it is based on open standards not enforced, or bastardized just enough to make them closed, that is evil. It also reveals another important seduction of business, creating convenience. People use Google Docs because it is easy to get started with, now exporting their work may be an entirely different problem, but that is what a captive market is for,
Were it not for a persistent cursor positioning bug in Google Chromium under Ubuntu, I might be trying to write open source code using Google Docs, but I would never use their WYSIWYG formats. So Google has shot itself in the foot.
If we're just going to use the word 'compelling' for fun, might as well save the trouble of working with Microsoft and just show the kids movies in between lessons.