Welcome to part 2 of my reporting on data from my Metadata MOOC. Today, let’s look at video viewership. And, the raw stuff: Definitions of these stats from the Coursera help documentation: Total Streaming Views: The sum of the total number of times each video lecture has been streamed. Total Downloads: The sum of the total number of times each video lecture was downloaded to a student’s computer. Unique Videos.. Read More
Data about the Metadata MOOC, Part 1: Student Activity
My Metadata MOOC is over! I clicked the button to issue Statements of Accomplishment and Verified Certificates earlier today. (If you were a student in the MOOC and you’re reading this, it will take about a week for these to actually be issued, during which Coursera will complete their review and work their magic on their side.) I’m very pleased with how it went, but I’ll make that the topic.. Read More
MOOC Forum video: A period piece
This Friday, an open forum will be held for faculty members at UNC to keep faculty informed about Carolina’s involvement with MOOCs and Coursera. This video was produced as a promo for the MOOC Forum. I’m posting it here because it seems to me that it nicely captures the state of the union, so to speak, of the public face of this initiative at Carolina. Which is to say, very.. Read More
If you want something done right, do it yourself
We’ve had two issues come up in the MOOC in last few days that I think are worth discussing here, as they’re both related to the issue of relying — or not — on other people’s resources. First: For some of the Unit 2 homework questions, I had pointed to students to a metadata record from Europeana, and asked questions like “What’s the name of the property in such-and-such property-value.. Read More
Thoughts on ILS curricula
The Provost’s office at UNC issued a call for proposals for MOOCs back in November of last year. I’d been wanting to teach a MOOC for some time at that point, having taken 3 or 4 as a student by then. So I submitted 2 proposals, one for a Metadata course & one for an XML course. Obviously the Metadata course was the one that the selection committee liked, and.. Read More
On finding a place to record videos
The first thing I want to report on, in my new series on working remotely, is the problem of finding a place to record videos for my MOOC. If I were in Chapel Hill, I could use the studio that ITS Teaching and Learning has set up for us MOOC instructors. Heck, I could even set up in my office. But I’m not in Chapel Hill, and I no longer.. Read More
MOOCs and OA
One of the FAQs on the course description page for my Coursera Metadata MOOC says: Will there be a required textbook? No. Readings will be selected from freely available articles, web content and open access scholarly literature. When I teach a classroom-based course, I can easily assign subscription content to my students: articles in journals or chapters from ebooks that the UNC libraries subscribe to. As I understand it, all.. Read More
I’m a Courserian
Last night, Coursera announced their most recent round of new partner universities, of which UNC-CH is one. Back in November, the Provost issued a Call for Proposals for MOOCs, and I submitted two. About a week & a half ago, I was informed that one of my proposals — for a course on metadata, modeled on the School’s course INLS 720 — was accepted as one of the first round.. Read More