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Webcast sponsored by the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre and hosted by Open UBC Week. What will higher education become as the MOOC innovation era plays out? Setting dire predictions aside it seems likely that students will have a vast range of resources for learning at their disposal. With MOOCs, MOORs, badge systems, learning communities and other innovations coming on line students will be able to get content delivery, active learning support, office hours and assessment from a variety of different sources. All of these will be available these at a wider range of price points and qualities than is possible today. What do we do with our on-campus courses in this environment? How can we use these innovations to offer students a better education than ever before? What will it be like running courses that make extensive use of open online resources? What will open online courses be best at? Worst? What must we excel at? These questions led us to develop a Coursera MOOC, which ran for the first time this summer. We are now offering that MOOC in parallel with an on-campus course, in a continued effort to understand the relative strengths of each modality. The talk will report on these experiences and present our current beliefs about the challenges ahead.

Speaker:

Gregor Kiczales is a Professor in the Computer Science Department. His work is directed at enabling programmers to write programs that, as much as possible, look like their design. He is best known for his work on aspect-oriented programming, and he led the Xerox PARC team that developed aspect-oriented programming and AspectJ. He is a co-author of “The Art of the Metaobject Protocol” and was one of the designers of the Common Lisp Object System (CLOS). He is an ACM Fellow and the 2012 recipient of the Dahl-Nygaard Senior Prize for his achievements in programming language design research. He is also the instructor for the Introduction to Systematic Program Design MOOC at Coursera.

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Webcast sponsored by the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre and hosted by Open UBC Week. Open access to research has become a core goal of academic libraries. The growth of open access initiatives, such as digital repositories, supports a very democratic notion of openly accessible publicly funded research. However, transitioning the support of open access initiatives to courses (e.g. LOOCs, MOOCs, e.g.) has been received with mixed views by librarians. Using current examples of courses at UBC, this session will explore open online courses and the future of library practice in these environments. This session will draw on participants ideas and opinions to further develop the dialogue on this issue.

Speaker:

Erin Fields is the Teaching and Learning Librarian at UBC Library with a focus on flexible learning environments. Her current work involves collaborating on a TLEF funded open online course and supporting the flexible learning initiative at UBC.