Online Education

Infographic: Online Learning

Anonymous — Mon, 01 Jun 2020 06:00:00 +0000

Infographic: Online Learning Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 06/01/2020 - 00:00

On Monday, March 16, CU Boulder went fully remote in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, meaning all classes and most jobs for the university’s more than 35,000 students and nearly 10,000 faculty and staff were online only. The feat was extraordinary. Here’s a look at the campus’s Zoom usage during the first two weeks alone, compared to March 2019.

Zoom Usage

Conferencing software used by students, faculty and staff.

1,679,600 minutes in March 2019
15,600,000 minutes in March 2020

540 new users in March 2019
39,000 new users in March 2020

8,280 meetings in March 2019
53,700 meetings in March 2020

All data collected as of March 31, 2020. CU Boulder students, faculty and staff pictured.

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Digital Frontier

Anonymous — Fri, 01 Jun 2018 15:07:00 +0000

Digital Frontier Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 06/01/2018 - 09:07

Eric Gershon

CU Boulder pioneers a MOOC-based graduate degree in electrical engineering.

Bob Erickson has won 13 patents, co-founded two companies and earned the title “CU Boulder Inventor of the Year.” Doing new things is old hat for him.

Lately he’s been at it again, leading a large cast of CU engineers and digital learning experts who are developing a new way for students to study engineering from afar — and earn a CU Boulder degree in it.

This fall, CU plans to offer the world’s first MOOC-based graduate degree in electrical engineering, a program that grew out of a massive open online course Erickson developed five years ago.

Anyone with an Internet connection will have the chance to earn a bona fide CU Boulder master’s degree in electrical engineering at their own pace, without setting foot in Colorado and at a far lower cost than studying on campus.

With the program, CU broadens access to graduate-level engineering training and enters the company of other online science education innovators, such as the Georgia Institute of Technology, which drew attention in 2014 with a fully online, low-cost master’s in computer science.

“Expanding access to the technological world and increasing our global engagement is what our college is all about,” said College of Engineering & Applied Science Dean Bobby Braun, who came to CU from Georgia Tech in 2016.

Students will pay about $20,000, or about half the cost of CU’s campus-based equivalent.

CU leaders believe the new online degree will attract motivated learners unlikely to enroll at any American campus — full-time professionals and foreign residents unable to move to the U.S.

“It is finding a new market,” said Erickson, who recruited fellow CU electrical engineering professors to develop the curriculum with the campus’ Office of Strategic Initiatives.

CU has offered various forms of distance learning for decades, including less-flexible online engineering degree programs. The new degree represents a major evolution that takes advantage of MOOCs, a class of online course characterized by low-cost, frequent (sometimes continuous) enrollment opportunities, virtually unlimited class sizes and extreme flexibility for students to watch video instruction and complete assignments, all untethered to the traditional semester schedule.

CU Boulder now offers nearly 45 MOOCs, mostly in engineering and including “Introduction to Power Electronics,” an updated version of Erickson’s debut 2014 MOOC, plus hundreds of other online courses. The university offers about half a dozen online degrees, though none entirely organized around MOOCs.

The new program represents a step forward for both CU and for engineering education generally.

There’s no admissions application, and there are no prerequisites — not even a bachelor’s degree, though the curriculum assumes competence in advanced mathematics. Students will be able to enroll online anytime through the online MOOC platform. Coursework is largely machine-graded.

Students pay as they go, making progress toward the degree with each successfully completed course. They also can earn credentials short of a degree, such as certificates. Much of the course content will be available for free, without the option of a credential.

A growing number of traditional nonprofit universities are offering credit-bearing online courses and degrees at various costs and with varying degrees of flexibility.

CU Boulder hasn’t announced additional MOOC-based degrees yet. But don’t be surprised if it does.

“In every discipline on campus,” Provost Russell Moore said in February, “our faculty are looking at new ways to teach and conduct research.”

Illustration by The Heads of State

CU Boulder pioneers a MOOC-based graduate degree in electrical engineering.

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MOOC

Anonymous — Fri, 01 Dec 2017 18:53:00 +0000

MOOC Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 12/01/2017 - 11:53

Eric Gershon

Whenever CU professor Robert Mazzeo offers “Exercise Physiology,” an upper-level undergraduate course popular with aspiring doctors, it fills quickly. So does the waiting list. He and a colleague each teach the class once a year to a combined total of about 230 students.

In June, Mazzeo, a member of the integrative physiology faculty and an avid tennis player, introduced an online version of the course called “The Science of Exercise” that also has proven popular — on a vastly greater scale and far beyond Boulder.

By early November, more than 35,000 people worldwide had at least sampled the course, a MOOC, or massive open online course. Nearly 800 were on track to finish it, many for fun and at no cost, others for a certificate of completion and a $49 fee. A new cohort of students enrolls every two weeks. There is no cap on enrollment.

“Based on the number of new students joining each week, ‘Science of Exercise’ is on track to be the most popular course in the history of CU,” said Cory Pavicich (Engl, Hum’04) of CU’s Office of Strategic Initiatives, which helps faculty design MOOCs.

MOOCs emerged about a decade ago. The 2012 debut of delivery platforms with ties to Stanford, Harvard and MIT led to a sustained burst of attention and a New York Times headline dubbing it “The Year of the MOOC.” The medium was hailed as a way to offer online learning to mass audiences at minimal or no cost, amid intensifying concerns about the high cost of traditional campus-based higher education.

The hype has died down, but MOOCs have shown they’re here to stay and that they can coexist with campus-based instruction while drawing huge numbers of additional off-campus learners. Coursera, one of the most prominent MOOC platforms, edX and Udacity now offer thousands of courses, commonly developed by professors at established universities, including CU Boulder.

After a modest start in MOOC development in 2013, when CU introduced its first four courses, including “Introduction to Power Electronics” and “Comic Books and Graphic Novels,” the university is rapidly growing its slate. As of November, nearly 25 MOOCs developed at CU Boulder were available on Coursera, the university’s main platform partner. By 2020, the electrical engineering department alone expects to add at least 50 more.

“MOOCs were once branded the death-knell of the university and then they were proclaimed dead, but, in reality, they remain a fascinating field of play,” said English professor William Kuskin, who as vice provost and associate vice chancellor for strategic initiatives oversees MOOC development. “It’s an arena that uniquely merges teaching and research in ways capable of reaching the entire globe.”

The hype has died down, but MOOCs are here to stay.

MOOCs are just one form of online education, and not the only one offered by CU Boulder. The School of Continuing Education offers a variety of paid online courses open to the public, for example, and the campus has eight fully online graduate degree programs, mostly in engineering. But MOOCs are proliferating fastest, largely because production requires only one professor and a small team, and most of the faculty work is up front rather than continuous.

Besides “Science of Exercise,” CU Boulder MOOCs include “Kinematics: Describing the Motions of Spacecraft,” “Graphic Design,” “Business Analytics for Decision Making” and “The Dynamics of Group Communication.” Others scheduled for debut are “Social and Emotional Learning and the Teacher,” “Roots and Shoots,” a collaboration with the Jane Goodall Institute, and “Active Optical Devices.”

“The mission of a university should be to provide educational opportunities to students and reach as many as possible,” said Juliet Gopinath, the electrical engineering professor who developed the optical devices MOOC. “The online forum allows us to reach non-traditional students and provide opportunities to those for whom it might be otherwise impossible. Personally, I also hope that it helps underrepresented groups as well as those in Third-World countries who struggle to find the time and opportunity to receive an education.”

As the name MOOC suggests, a MOOC ("massive open") is easy to join. Anyone with an internet connection can participate by visiting a provider website, such as coursera.org, registering, picking a course and clicking the first lesson. Learners can watch instructional videos and consume other course materials (readings, quizzes, projects) for free. To be evaluated and eligible for a certificate of completion, students pay a fee, typically less than $100 on Coursera.

Two years ago, Mazzeo hadn’t even heard of MOOCs. When he did, from Russell Moore, the university provost, Mazzeo seized on the potential for propagating the core message of his teaching and research — that “exercise is medicine” — at an exponentially greater rate than possible on campus.

All this means the campus and MOOC versions of Mazzeo’s course complement rather than compete with each other.

Working with a CU team of learning design experts, Mazzeo condensed and simplified the lectures from his semester-long campus course, shot a series of videos and developed new quizzes that could be scored by software or other students in the course. Within months, thousands of people around the world were enrolling in “Science of Exercise.”

“I’m reaching populations I never thought I’d reach in my career,” said Mazzeo, who marvels over students’ locations, which he surveys on an electronic dashboard on his office computer: Botswana, Qatar, Algeria, Nepal, Iraq, India and scores of others. At least two-thirds of all people enrolled in CU Boulder’s MOOCs live outside the U.S., according to Pavicich.

All this means the campus and MOOC versions of Mazzeo’s course complement rather than compete with each other.

“These are truly new students for the �鶹��Ƶ,” Pavicich said.

Mazzeo’s MOOC covers the same basic concepts as his in-the-flesh course, “Exercise Physiology.” But it’s not the same course, and isn’t intended to be.

The MOOC, which consists of four modules that can be completed at the student’s pace within a 180-day period, is shorter and less technical, for example. It involves fewer and less-detailed tests. And successful completion of the MOOC doesn’t confer CU academic credit.

Kuskin’s group believes MOOCs serve the university’s fundamental mission and key interests in several ways.

They fulfill the broad mandate of providing public education, and they amplify CU’s renown. At least one CU department has reported that its MOOCs have helped attract full-time, degree-seeking students to campus.

Teaching through new media also prompts professors to reevaluate how and what students ought to learn. This can lead them to modify and improve traditional classroom courses.

And MOOCs are a source of revenue, modestly so far for CU, but with potential for significant growth.

Many universities have raced ahead in online education, among them Arizona State and the University of Florida, which bring in tens of millions of dollars through their programs, including online degree programs. The University of California Berkeley offers an online master’s program in public health, and Georgia Tech offers online master’s programs in computer science and analytics. MIT offers a pair of online “MicroMasters” credentials that can lead to admission to an accelerated on-campus master’s degree.

In time, CU Boulder expects to increase its share of paid online certificates and degree programs, according to Pavicich. MOOCs offer a foundation for that effort while immediately serving a greater number and variety of learners than the university ever has, he said — both newcomers to higher education and people who simply want more of it.

“We are past the point where you can assume you’re done learning when you’re 22 or 23,” Pavicich said. “You should expect to learn throughout your life.”

Illustration by Harry Campbell

Online education gains steam at CU Boulder.

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