Teaching Numerical Computing to STEM students with Open edX

Slides for the presentation at the Open edX Conference, Cambridge, MA 2014.

In Fall 2014, I am teaching one of the first independent MOOCs using Open edX. We customized and installed our instance of Open edX (with support from our partners at IBL Studios Education) in August 2014.

 

This initiative has several new features: (1) it is a collaboration in teaching across three universities, each running a local, for-credit course, while the instructors collaborate on course content and creating learning objects; (2) the course is unbundled into a set of modules, each meant to take about two or three weeks to complete, and we plan on awarding digital badges for the modules, plus an "expert" badge for completing all modules, instead of a course certificate; (3) we are developing all course content in an open fashion, using permissive license options.

In this talk, I describe our initiative and also explain some of the pedagogical underpinnings: the role of open sharing in an age of connectivist learning, the pedagogical value of interactive computing, and the role of the learners as participants in a networked community that provides the learning framework.

 

Slides under Creative Commons Attribution CC-BY 4.0 license. (c) 2014 Lorena A. Barba.