⚙️ Work
We had a “zoom-TI-meeting-free” week, to help reduce the “wow do we spend a lot of time staring at each other in tiny boxes” thing. Which was a bit challenging, as we had a new team member start this week. Working remotely for now because of the pandemic, but without a team meeting to meet the rest of the team. It’s an interesting experience, I’m sure. Team meeting on Monday to help with that…
Tyson’s been working hard on the news/blog/updates section of elearn.ucalgary.ca - lots of updates in the latest update.
🤔 PhD
Not much concrete, but am still thinking through the plans for the design study project and waiting for approval from the ethics board before I can start that…
📚 Reading
Alsaad, F., Reichel, T., Zeng, Y., & Alawini, A. (2021). Topic Transitions in MOOCs: An Analysis Study. In Educational Data Mining 2021. (via Stephen Downes)
[It’s a super-technical paper, describing how they developed an algorithm to map and predict content sequences in online courses. An eventual end product from this work could be useful in helping instructors map out the content in their courses.]
Jefferson Pooley, in The Chronicle: MIT and Harvard Have Sold Higher Education’s Future
[this is a bit overstated - EdX was never the future of higher education. But, the end of an era? transition to for-profit moocs? I’ll need to think more about the implications of this, as we work on our own mooc strategy…]
🧺 Other
Didn’t get out on the bike much this week, between heat and rain. But Saturday morning was perfect.
🗓️ Focus for next week
Planning for the transition back to campus. Planning some pilot projects that we will be leading in the fall semester.