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."

Comments

The problem isn't PowerPoint itself

[sootman]

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.

Re:The problem isn't PowerPoint itself

[PopeRatzo]

As long as there is OpenOffice,org, LibreOffice, etc, there is no need to be drawn to the dark side.

Raise your hands: Who here trusts Microsoft (or Google) with education?

They're going to monetize this somehow, and that money is going to be taken from the hides of educators and children. It doesn't have to be that way.

Re:Offtopic, HTTPS certificate is expired

[NotInHere]

AC is right, it expires today.

Are they trying to reproduce this?

[matbury]

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.

MOOC...riiiiight...

[bradley13]

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

mmmm data! nom nom nom

[sgt scrub]

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.

Plenty of k-12 resources

[fermion]

There are a couple of things going on here. First, there are plenty of places a K-12 teacher can go to create content for their class. Some of these resources are pay-for sites, some are free in limited use. For instance Prezi and Pollev can be used for most of what happens in a classroom. In addition, there is nothing stopping a K-12 teacher using something like Moodle to organize content using many different tools. This just insures that MS tools get used. There is nothing wrong with that, there are other sites out there that only use google tools.

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.

Re:Plenty of k-12 resources

[MaskedSlacker]

I despise Prezi. It's powerpoint with asinine animations and always-on internet required. Every time someone suggests I use Prezi in my classroom I want to cut their tongue out with an angle grinder. Ugh.

Re:Plenty of k-12 resources

[fermion]

I have not used Prezi that much, but I do not that local software can be used to play the files offline. Some people find it good to create links. I generally use LaTex.