Tag: using video

MOOCing around: Week 1 Ending

Group of FishIt’s so interesting to take a class in a subject I haven’t taken in a looooooooong time (statistics).

I’m in a MOOC with 74,999 other students. I’ve used the Khan Academy videos on statistics to help me (and I’m just finishing week one!). I finished the video Koala Sleeping in Treelectures and the first quiz (no score yet) and I’m working on the first assignment due tomorrow (Tuesday, 9/11).  It’s taken me at least 4 hours so far.

Fun, yet daunting. I plan to finish, even if I have to pull a few all-nighters!

According to Kevin Carey, in the article Into the Future With MOOC’s in the Chronicle of Higher Education, MOOCs represent the future of education. He refers to his own experience in a mega-sized face to face economics course as evidence that mass-produced education is not new and that it can be more cost-efficient.

I agree, but only to a certain extent. MOOCs are useful, even for credit (although I’m not taking the stats course for credit). However, the structure of MOOCs must Teacher and classchange to incorporate critical thinking and higher order skills. I think MOOCs are great for those of us who want access to learning…period. I want MOOC creators to keep expanding their subjects and use. For those who need more hands on and for those subjects that require more analysis, MOOCs will not work. Not yet. Not without a mass infusion of ….. je ne sais quoiCalculator & Math Symbolss….a more in depth relationship among  learners, instructors and the critical thinking skills/content.

How will I know whether I’ve learned from this MOOC? There are tests, assignments and (my goal) my increased comfort with and ability to read articles that include statistical analyses. And isn’t that truly what learning is about?

Fair Use, Smair Use….If It’s on the Web or Digital, It’s Free, Especially to Educators, Isn’t It?!

Information on the web is free for anyone to use. That’s what I’ve heard students say from time to time. It is relatively easy to debunk that myth by discussing creator’s rights under copyright law.

What’s more challenging is helping faculty identify that same principle: we know there’s a a copyright law. We know there’s an exception to that law called fair use. What is more difficult is to determine whether our conduct fits within the definition of fair use.In the article Have College Professors Become Digital Pirates?, Andrew Chow, J.D., discusses this very issue. Universities and faculty have been sued for including copyrighted material in e-reserves, for copying videos from film to digital format (UCLA won that one) and for digitizing books. As the article notes, there are several factors courts consider in determining whether a use constitutes fair use, including the purpose and  type of use,  the amount of use and the potential impact copying would have on the market. Many Universities devote websites to assisting faculty (and students) determine fair use (see e.g. the Copyright Clearance Center’s Checklist).

This does raise a question I’ve raised before: shouldn’t copyright law be changed to address the new ways information is made available? Shouldn’t videos, as digital information, be priced differently? Should copyright law be changed to make it easier for educators to use copyrighted information in the interests of furthering knowledge? I consider it a great compliment if someone uses what I’ve created (it’s still a rare occurrence, though!). I would like acknowledgement, so others can find and use it, but feel no obligation to chase after someone who used what I created.

Would I feel differently if that someone was not an educator, but a corporation that made money from my work? Probably-I’d Giantexpect that corporation to provide me some compensation, that way we could both share in the profit made. More importantly, though, my work, my words, what I’ve developed, has not been developed in isolation. I have stood on the shoulders of giants to get where I am today. So, I am happy to share and help others learn.

Making Videos Accessible

Collaboration can be used in multiple ways to help increase accessibility of educational resources. This fits with concepts of Universal Design for Learning that make educational information as accessible as possible for others.

In the article Making Videos Accessible with Universal Subtitles, George Williams explains how the website Universal Subtitles is encouraging people to collaborate to write subtitles through posting and editing transcripts of posted videos. You can upload a video to ask for subtitling and you can volunteer to subtitle.

I’m going to try something similar in my classes (although students will not be volunteers, but will probably get some sort of credit for it). I’m going to ask students to develop transcripts of narrated PowerPoints and videos that I develop or use for the class. I’ll let you know in a future post how (or whether) that works when I implement it in the Spring 2011 semester.

Multi-tasking

According to the author of Learning to Teach Through Video we cannot process 3 different instructional mediums at the same time. Thus, a screen cast needs narration and picture or text and a picture, but not narration, text and a picture.

How does that affect our accessibility push? I guess it means that one section should be a base and the other sections should be optional. In other words, the picture (for example) would be the base and individuals can choose between narration and text.