Dear Commons Community,

I spent the better part of today at Pace University at its Annual Best Practices Conference on Teaching with Technology.  I gave the keynote presentation on Blended Learning Meets MOOCs:  Education’s Digital Future.  The abstract is below and the Powerpoint is available at slideshare.net specifically at: http://www.slideshare.net/apicciano/blended-learning-pace-march-2013-slideshare-version

Good discussion and questions on a topic of increasing importance to our colleagues around academia.

Tony

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Blended Learning Meets MOOCs:  Education’s Digital Future

Abstract

The purpose of this presentation is to examine the influence of two major developments in online learning namely blended learning and massive open online courses (MOOCs) on the future of education.  Both of these developments evolved from the basic asynchronous online learning model that arrived in the 1990s and continues today.   Blended learning which combines aspects of face-to-face and online  learning into a single course or academic program, gained widespread popularity in the early 2000s.  The term MOOC was coined in 2008 and made a major breakthrough at Stanford University in 2011 when over 100,000 students from around the world enrolled in a computer engineering course led by Sebastian Thrun.   The major thrust of Dr. Picciano’s presentation is that the pedagogical value of blended learning combined with the scalability of MOOCs will be major drivers in education for the foreseeable future.

Other aspects of online learning technology related to individualized learning environments, learning analytics  and instructional ecosystems will also be presented.   Dr. Picciano will draw specifically on his own work in online and blended learning, the research of Allen & Seaman, and recent MOOC developments such as the agreement between San Jose State University in California and Udacity to develop jointly a series of remedial and introductory courses to be implemented in the latter part of 2013.