Music Learning with Massive Open Online Courses

Steels, Luc et al.-- Editors: Luc SteelsMassive Open Online Courses, known as MOOCs, have arisen as the logical consequence of marrying long-distance education with the web and social media. MOOCs were confidently predicted by advanced thinkers decades ago. They are undoubtedly here to stay, and provide a valuable resource for learners and teachers alike. This book focuses on music as a domain of knowledge, and has three objectives: to introduce the phenomenon of MOOCs; to present ongoing research into making MOOCs more effective and better adapted to the needs of teachers and learners; and finally to present the first steps towards 'social MOOCs’, which support the creation of learning communities in which interactions between learners go beyond correcting each other's assignments. Social MOOCs try to mimic settings for humanistic learning, such as workshops, small choirs, or groups participating in a Hackathon, in which students aided by somebody acting as a tutor learn by solving problems and helping each other. The papers in this book all discuss steps towards social MOOCs; their foundational pedagogy, platforms to create learning communities, methods for assessment and social feedback and concrete experiments. These papers are organized into five sections: background; the role of feedback; platforms for learning communities; experiences with social MOOCs; and looking backwards and looking forward. Technology is not a panacea for the enormous challenges facing today's educators and learners, but this book will be of interest to all those striving to find more effective and humane learning opportunities for a larger group of students.Funded by the European Commission's OpenAIRE2020 project.Peer reviewe

Developing sustainable business models for institutions’ provision of open educational resources: Learning from OpenLearn users’ motivations and experiences

Universities across the globe have, for some time, been exploring the possibilities for achieving public benefit and generating business and visibility through releasing and sharing open educational resources (OER). Many have written about the need to develop sustainable and profitable business models around the production and release of OER. Downes (2006), for example, has questioned the financial sustainability of OER production at scale. Many of the proposed business models focus on OER’s value in generating revenue and detractors of OER have questioned whether they are in competition with formal education. This paper reports on a study intended to broaden the conversation about OER business models to consider the motivations and experiences of OER users as the basis for making a better informed decision about whether OER and formal learning are competitive or complementary with each other. The study focused on OpenLearn - the Open University’s (OU) web-based platform for OER, which hosts hundreds of online courses and videos and is accessed by over 3,000,000 users a year. A large scale survey and follow-up interviews with OpenLearn users worldwide revealed that university provided OER can offer learners a bridge to formal education, allowing them to try out a subject before registering on a formal course and to build confidence in their abilities as learners. In addition, it was found that using OER during formal paid-for study can improve learners’ performance and self-reliance, leading to increased retention and satisfaction with the learning experience

DeepEval: An Integrated Framework for the Evaluation of Student Responses in Dialogue Based Intelligent Tutoring Systems

The automatic assessment of student answers is one of the critical components of an Intelligent Tutoring System (ITS) because accurate assessment of student input is needed in order to provide effective feedback that leads to learning. But this is a very challenging task because it requires natural language understanding capabilities. The process requires various components, concepts identification, co-reference resolution, ellipsis handling etc. As part of this thesis, we thoroughly analyzed a set of student responses obtained from an experiment with the intelligent tutoring system DeepTutor in which college students interacted with the tutor to solve conceptual physics problems, designed an automatic answer assessment framework (DeepEval), and evaluated the framework after implementing several important components. To evaluate our system, we annotated 618 responses from 41 students for correctness. Our system performs better as compared to the typical similarity calculation method. We also discuss various issues in automatic answer evaluation

Open educational resources for all? Comparing user motivations and characteristics across The Open University’s iTunes U channel and OpenLearn platform.

With the rise in access to mobile multimedia devices, educational institutions have exploited the iTunes U platform as an additional channel to provide free educational resources with the aim of profile-raising and breaking down barriers to education. For those prepared to invest in content preparation, it is possible to produce interactive, portable material that can be made available globally. Commentators have questioned both the financial implications for platform-specific content production, and the availability of devices for learners to access it (Osborne, 2012). The Open University (OU) makes its free educational resources available on iTunes U and via its web-based open educational resources (OER) platform, OpenLearn. The OU’s OER on iTunes U reached the 60 million download mark in 2013; its OpenLearn platform boasts 27 million unique visitors since 2006. This paper reports the results of a large-scale study of users of the OU’s iTunes U channel and OpenLearn platform. A survey of several thousand users revealed key differences in demographics between those accessing OER via the web and via iTunes U. In addition, the data allowed comparison between three groups: formal learners, informal learners and educators. The study raises questions about whether university-provided OER meet the needs of users and makes recommendations for how content can be modified to suit their needs. As the publishing of OER becomes core to business, we reflect on reasons why understanding users’ motivations and demographics is vital, allowing for needs-led resource provision and content that is adapted to best achieve learner satisfaction, and to deliver institutions’ social mission

Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Technology in Mathematics Teaching: Making and Strengthening "Connections and Connectivity" for Teaching Mathematics with Technology

The 15th International Conference on Technology in Mathematics Teaching (ICTMT 15) took place on September 13–16, 2022, in the Danish School of Education, Aarhus University, located on campus Emdrup, in the Northwestern district of Copenhagen, Denmark. There were a total of 66 participants from 15 different countries. ICTMT 15 certainly focused on the impacts that the coronavirus pandemic has had on global mathematics education. However, it looked at the impacts of digital technology from a much wider perspective. In particular, the conference aimed to highlight how technology facilitates the multiple “Connections and Connectivity” between us all to achieve the goals of purposeful mathematics education in the early 21st century. By “Connections” we mean the interrelationships between researchers, teachers, students, parents, policymakers, and industry (big and small). “Connectivity” includes oral, aural, textual and gestural communications as mediated by the internet, learning environments and classroom activities. Together, “Connections and Connectivity” describes the relationships between people, between different ideas and strategies to teach, and between people and environments. It offers a frame through which to interpret assessment in mathematics education as a more formative process from the point of view of both teachers and students

Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Technology in Mathematics Teaching: Making and Strengthening "Connections and Connectivity" for Teaching Mathematics with Technology

The 15th International Conference on Technology in Mathematics Teaching (ICTMT 15) took place on September 13–16, 2022, in the Danish School of Education, Aarhus University, located on campus Emdrup, in the Northwestern district of Copenhagen, Denmark. There were a total of 66 participants from 15 different countries. ICTMT 15 certainly focused on the impacts that the coronavirus pandemic has had on global mathematics education. However, it looked at the impacts of digital technology from a much wider perspective. In particular, the conference aimed to highlight how technology facilitates the multiple “Connections and Connectivity” between us all to achieve the goals of purposeful mathematics education in the early 21st century. By “Connections” we mean the interrelationships between researchers, teachers, students, parents, policymakers, and industry (big and small). “Connectivity” includes oral, aural, textual and gestural communications as mediated by the internet, learning environments and classroom activities. Together, “Connections and Connectivity” describes the relationships between people, between different ideas and strategies to teach, and between people and environments. It offers a frame through which to interpret assessment in mathematics education as a more formative process from the point of view of both teachers and students