Teaching at Scale: Instructor Experiences with Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs)

MOOCs are large online courses in which any individual with access to the internet can enroll, usually for free. Distance and online education are not new, but the scale and scope of MOOCs raise novel questions about access to higher education, faculty work, and the adoption of new technologies for teaching and learning. There is little literature on the motivations, experiences and behaviors of faculty who teach MOOCs. This dissertation study seeks to illuminate this unexamined aspect of faculty work by answering the following research question: Why do faculty teach MOOCs, and how do their beliefs and experiences inside and outside the university shape their MOOC experience? I investigate the question of why university faculty decide to participate in a new and potentially risky form of online teaching, and how their beliefs, values, and experiences are connected with, and/or shape, their MOOC teaching practices. I conducted a single-institution interview study of MOOC faculty at the University of Michigan. Michigan was an early partner of Coursera, a MOOC company, which announced its first set of offerings in April 2012. My methodology is derived from recent approaches to phenomenology (e.g. Seidman, 2005). I interviewed 16 U-M faculty and instructors who had taught at least one MOOC as of March, 2015. I also conducted observations at events where MOOC instructors were presenting as panelists and likely to be in attendance, and collected contextual information from publicly available videos, news coverage, and articles that involved the participants. Using a phenomenological approach to interviewing and analysis, I conducted multiple interviews with each participant, focusing on their lived experience and meaning-making of the MOOC experience. The professional growth perspective outlined by O’Meara, Terosky, and Neumann (2008) provides a set of sensitizing concepts for my approach to understanding MOOC faculty. The findings provide a set of profiles of the study participants as well as thematic analysis on participants’ motivations for MOOC teaching, and their experiences. I identified four major reasons why instructors chose to teach a MOOC. There was rarely a single motivating factor, but rather several considerations that contributed to the decision. They were: Desire for a platform, interest in experimentation, altruism, and an aim to raise the profile of either themselves or their programs. Among the experiences of MOOC faculty, I note several themes, including: MOOC instructors’ assertions that they learned a great deal about teaching from doing the MOOC; the contrast between participants who felt isolated in their MOOC work and those who made connections; the increased visibility that came with MOOC teaching, which was sometimes a source of awkwardness and discomfort; and the balancing act MOOC teaching required, because of the enormous time demands of producing a MOOC and the already busy lives of successful faculty. This study makes several contributions to the research on faculty work lives. First, provides insight into the experiences of faculty adopting a new educational technology in the early stage of development; MOOCs are new learning technologies that affect the way faculty teach, learn, and interact with students and that thus deserve study. It also evaluates the faculty growth framework, which is relatively new, as an analytical lens, as well as suggest possible expansions to the framework based on the findings emerging from my study.PHDHigher EducationUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/145913/1/mollyak_1.pd

Faculty Rights to Scholarly Research

This chapter provides a history of the scholarly publishing system,and explains how it has evolved to benefit corporate publishers to the detriment of faculty, universities, and the public. It offers the open access movement as a potential remedy for the publishing crisis, and describes the policy environment surrounding these new forms of communication.Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/136177/1/Kleinman-2017-New_Directions_for_Higher_Education.pdfDescription of Kleinman-2017-New_Directions_for_Higher_Education.pdf : Main articl

A Few Things Every Instruction Librarian Should Know About Copyright

http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/61255/1/352_kleinman.pd

Reaching the Heart of the University: Libraries and the Future of OER

University libraries are well positioned to run or support OER production and publication operations. Many university libraries already have the technical, service, and policy infrastructure in place that would provide economies of scale for nascent and mature OER projects. Given a number of aligning factors, the University of Michigan (U-M) has an excellent opportunity to integrate Open.Michigan, its OER operation, into the University Library. This paper presents the case for greater university library involvement in OER projects generally, with U-M as a case study.https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/78006/1/ReachingtheHeartoftheUniversity-KleymeerKleinmanHanss.pdfhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/78006/4/ReachingtheHeartoftheUniversity-KleymeerKleinmanHanss.docxDescription of ReachingtheHeartoftheUniversity-KleymeerKleinmanHanss.pdf : Main articleDescription of ReachingtheHeartoftheUniversity-KleymeerKleinmanHanss.docx : Editable version (MS Word

Ask Us - Survey

The goal of this survey was to offer users the opportunity to select a graphic to represent the Ask Us reference service from a variety of options (as determined by a review of how other libraries represent this service). Specifically, we wanted to learn if users prefer Ask Us or Ask a Librarian and if they prefer text to describe the methods for contacting a librarian, icons to describe the methods for contacting a librarian, or neither text nor icons.Usability Grouphttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/107006/1/Gateway_AskUs_Survey.pd

The Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey of SDSS-III

The Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS) is designed to measure the scale of baryon acoustic oscillations (BAO) in the clustering of matter over a larger volume than the combined efforts of all previous spectroscopic surveys of large scale structure. BOSS uses 1.5 million luminous galaxies as faint as i=19.9 over 10,000 square degrees to measure BAO to redshifts z<0.7. Observations of neutral hydrogen in the Lyman alpha forest in more than 150,000 quasar spectra (g<22) will constrain BAO over the redshift range 2.15<z<3.5. Early results from BOSS include the first detection of the large-scale three-dimensional clustering of the Lyman alpha forest and a strong detection from the Data Release 9 data set of the BAO in the clustering of massive galaxies at an effective redshift z = 0.57. We project that BOSS will yield measurements of the angular diameter distance D_A to an accuracy of 1.0% at redshifts z=0.3 and z=0.57 and measurements of H(z) to 1.8% and 1.7% at the same redshifts. Forecasts for Lyman alpha forest constraints predict a measurement of an overall dilation factor that scales the highly degenerate D_A(z) and H^{-1}(z) parameters to an accuracy of 1.9% at z~2.5 when the survey is complete. Here, we provide an overview of the selection of spectroscopic targets, planning of observations, and analysis of data and data quality of BOSS.Comment: 49 pages, 16 figures, accepted by A

The Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey of SDSS-III

The Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS) is designed to measure the scale of baryon acoustic oscillations (BAO) in the clustering of matter over a larger volume than the combined efforts of all previous spectroscopic surveys of large-scale structure. BOSS uses 1.5 million luminous galaxies as faint as i = 19.9 over 10,000 deg(2) to measure BAO to redshifts z < 0.7. Observations of neutral hydrogen in the Ly alpha forest in more than 150,000 quasar spectra (g < 22) will constrain BAO over the redshift range 2.15 < z < 3.5. Early results from BOSS include the first detection of the large-scale three-dimensional clustering of the Ly alpha forest and a strong detection from the Data Release 9 data set of the BAO in the clustering of massive galaxies at an effective redshift z = 0.57. We project that BOSS will yield measurements of the angular diameter distance d(A) to an accuracy of 1.0% at redshifts z = 0.3 and z = 0.57 and measurements of H(z) to 1.8% and 1.7% at the same redshifts. Forecasts for Ly alpha forest constraints predict a measurement of an overall dilation factor that scales the highly degenerate D-A(z) and H-1(z) parameters to an accuracy of 1.9% at z similar to 2.5 when the survey is complete. Here, we provide an overview of the selection of spectroscopic targets, planning of observations, and analysis of data and data quality of BOSS

Copyright: Know the Basics

Presentation discussing the basics of copyright, author rights, fair use, etc

Reaching the Heart of the University : Libraries and the Future of OER

University libraries are well positioned to run or support OER production and publication operations. Many university libraries already have the technical, service, and policy infrastructure in place that would provide economies of scale for nascent and mature OER projects. Given a number of aligning factors, the University of Michigan (U-M) has an excellent opportunity to integrate Open.Michigan, its OER operation, into the University Library. This paper presents the case for greater university library involvement in OER projects generally, with U-M as a case study