edX offers Big Data and Social Physics

MIT in collaboration with edX, a MOOC provider, is soon to start a course on Big Data. The course will take about 5 hours to complete and will begin on 12 May. If you're interested in learning more about Big Data, and its possible uses, this is the course for you!

If you've not studied online before, this could be a great way to test it out. It's completely free, and you can even earn a personalised certificate if you complete all the activities and exercises.

For more information, see this link.

Hope you al have a great week :)

-Caitlin Williams
ALIA Sydney Social Media Officer

Me and the MOOC

MOOCs. Heard of them? Taken one? Wondering what I’m on about?

Massive Open Online Courses seem to be popping up all over the Internet right now. The idea is simple: using the Internet to run courses for free for large numbers of people. As one of my favourite blogs - Hack Education - puts it, MOOCs offer “… the promise of scaling a university education to everyone… well everyone with an Internet connection that is”. And it seems that when MOOCs say ‘massive', they mean it, with Inside Higher Ed reporting that over 1.5 million people have registered for MOOCs. Last year, more than 160,000 students around the globe signed up for a free online course in artificial intelligence offered through Stanford University – a class size nearly eight times the size of Stanford’s entire student body. 

I was intrigued (and always up for learning new things, especially for free) so I started looking for some MOOCs to join. 

I looked at MITx, (which has now been incorporated into the site edX - a combined project of Harvard University and MIT), Udacity and Coursera. Coursera is the newest of the bunch, run by two Stanford professors and promising a wide range of disciplines (many of the MOOCs so far have focused on computer science courses, whereas Cousera promises classes in diverse subject areas ranging from poetry to science fiction, sociology to folklore). 

I found a tempting array of courses, and ended up enrolling in a course on physics (a subject I’ve never studied), which starts shortly. 

My motivation wasn’t only to learn about physics, however. Next year some of the major courses I support as an academic librarian will be moving all their lectures online. Students will still have tutorials, but no longer will they be filling a large lecture hall to listen to an academic explain concepts to them. They will need to go online to access their lectures, and make time to listen to them before their tutorial group each week.

As an academic librarian, I often present to lecture theatres packed full of new students, and later on, to those same students in their second year and again in their third year. Many of the students in those massive lecture theatres come and find me in the library in the following weeks as they find themselves confronted with their first essay question … or their tenth. Either way, I’m happy to help, and pleased if my brief appearance at their lecture led them to the library for help. 

So, I’ve been thinking about how to move library support online. And I’ve been curious about online learning – how it can be done well, and what pitfalls to avoid. I did my LIS post grad qualifications at a London university face-to-face, so I’ve never been an online-only student. By taking part in a MOOC I hope to be able to evaluate the experience as a student learning a brand-new subject area. I want to find out what works and what doesn’t in online learning. I’m hoping that this ‘learning by doing’ experiment will enable me to understand what my students are facing as their content increasingly goes online, and how best I can support them in this environment. Oh, and I’d be pretty pleased to learn a bit about physics too. 

I’ll leave you with a final quote from Hack Education blog on the subject, which pretty much sums up what I want to find out.

"…when we switched from scrolls to books, we had to rethink how teaching and learning happened. And now again, it’s time to reconsider these things. Who do we best teach online?  How does pacing change when you move your lectures online?  How much, truly, can we rely on lecture after all?  How often should assessment happen and what does it look like? What’s appropriate feedback? How do we support and connect learners in a MOOC? How do we support faculty? 

And how does this change the university? Are these "disruptions" just online, or is the offline, on-campus experience changed now as well?

… By being able to take advantage of online educational content -- particularly lecture content from some of the best professors at the most prestigious universities in the world -- students will benefit too."

I’ll let you know how I go being one of these students. 

Sarah Fearnley 

Sarah is an Events Coordinator for the ALIA Sydney Committee. She works at the University of Western Sydney Library. All opinions expressed are her own.

Online Study

This year is the first year I have studied online. I wasn't completely sure it was the best way for me, but decided to give it a go. As those two subjects are winding up now, I've had mixed feelings about how successful it has been for me, but would feel confident about tackling it again in the future.

One of the hardest things about online study for me was missing the comments, questions, and discussions that are part of face to face learning. I love it when I don’t quite get something and the person next to me can explain it in a different way to the teacher, and then it clicks for me.

In the classes I attended, the forum is intended to take the place of this interaction, but it didn't always work well. Some students are too reserved to contribute, or don’t put up questions because they worry it doesn’t show them in a good light. Others are just happy to read the forums but don’t want to participate.  When the forums (fora?) are not well used it can be quite isolating for students. I started to think no one else is asking questions because they all get it and I’m the only dumb one, or a more sinister line of thinking, the others are all emailing direct to the teacher and I am missing out. A successful online class fosters an active forum with wide participation, so jump on in.

Another aspect I found hard was linking up with other students. Although I didn’t have any group assignment work, I do love having a chat with other students, giving or getting tips about sources, and even just having a moan about something in the course. From some conversations I’ve had recently with Sydney based students studying at Charles Sturt, they also found that contacting and meeting up with other students locally to form study/support groups was an enormous benefit, and really kept them going. I was lucky enough that some of my online classmates were also in my face to face class in another subject. If your class isn’t fostering this type of interaction, then you need to be the one to reach out.  It’s worth the effort.

One final thing I found was that in one subject, I was just so focused on completing the work, that I really didn’t get a good sense of the whole subject. Keeping to the timetable took up a lot of my attention in this subject, and sometimes it just had to be as mechanical as that, as I had to balance other subjects too, and it wasn’t until I started the revision that I began to see the bigger picture. I always like to try to investigate widely on subjects I’m studying because I don’t just want to pass, I want to understand the subject well. Make sure you try to see the forest as well as the trees. Of course, an active forum, and a friendly cohort can help with this.

Have you undertaken online study? What are your best tips and what would you change?

Lauren Castan