Manav Malhotra's blog

Coursera MOOC "Fundamentals of Online Education: Planning and Application" Suspended Due to Poor Planning and Application

Mon, 04 Feb 2013 09:40:10 -0500

Coursera MOOC Fundamentals of Online Education: Planning and Application was suspended yesterday due to technical and organizational challenges (e.g. using Google Docs for a class with 40k students). I won't belabor the point, but you can read the details here. There's also a good discussion of the issue on the blog of someone enrolled in the course.

Snow Fall & The New York Times: Seamlessly Integrating Multimedia

Thu, 20 Dec 2012 14:49:35 -0500

A friend of mine sent me this New York Times piece which does a beautiful job of integrating multimedia. The movies and slides feel like part of the experience rather than additional content. Check it out on an HTML 5 supported browser.

MVC -> MOVE?

Mon, 02 Jul 2012 18:44:43 -0400

I came across an interesting revision of the MVC framework, breaking the Contoller into Operations and Events (MOVE). It seems logical enough, but I wonder what you developers think. Is the Controller becoming too unwieldy for good object-oriented design?

EdMedia Presentations

Tue, 26 Jun 2012 00:40:33 -0400

Greetings from smokey Denver!

Zhou and I have been preparing for our talk tomorrow as well as gathering a list of the talks that we are interested in attending. I've copied some of them below. Feel free to look through the presentation list and suggest any others you might like us to report about.

Using Data Visualization Tools to Support Online Discussion Facilitation
ID: 36212
Type: Best Practices Session Topic: Improving Classroom Teaching
Room: 3
Tue, Jun. 26 2:45 PM-3:05 PM

Authors:
Bridget Arend, University of Denver, United States
Abstract:
Online asynchronous discussions can serve as an effective medium for reflection and critical thinking in online, hybrid and on-campus courses. However, text-heavy discussions can become cumbersome and facilitating online discussions can be a time consuming and arduous task for even the most conscientious instructor. Data visualization tools are available to support the instructor’s facilitative role and allow quick and easy snapshots of student participation as well as discussion themes and paths. This paper will describe lessons learned from the use of open source data visualization tools over eight iterations of a professional development course for online faculty.

Group Genius and Bell Labs

Tue, 05 Jun 2012 00:12:59 -0400

As I was reading Group Genius, I was reminded of a short op-ed that I think might be a nice supplement to our discussion. It revolves around the physical and cultural environment that fostered the breakthroughs that came out of Bell Labs, the most innovative place on the planet this side of the Manhattan Project (and perhaps even the other side if you consider the breadth of Bell Labs' work). With inventions ranging from the transistor and the laser to Unix and C, the ideas and devices that came out of there have completely transformed the way we work, play, and fight.

There are a number of values shared by both the EdLab and Bell Labs - bringing together different disciplines as the best way to solve complex problems and the importance of physical proximity to name a few. I think there's a lot we can learn from them (though from what I've read, they often had problems with humility, so they don't quite have the EdLab/Fred philosophy).

NYC - #2! NYC is Now Home to the Fastest Growing Tech Industry in the US

Thu, 10 May 2012 11:53:43 -0400

New York City has now trumped Boston as the number 2 birthplace for tech companies in the US. It's unclear exactly how much was organic growth due to synergies with the financial, fashion, and media industries which are based in NYC and how much can be attributed to Bloomberg's push. While there are some great programs that came out of the Economic Development Corporation during Bloomberg's reign, I'm inclined to give more weight to the former. Foursquare, for example, was able to race in front of Gowalla largely because it was based in New York instead of Austin, allowing them to form some key partnerships with big media players like Bravo. The report is really interesting; you can read it here.

Either way, the results make the case for LaunchPad even stronger.

Some of My Favorite Pictures from the Academic Festival

Tue, 08 May 2012 22:57:27 -0400

Vialogues at EdMedia 2012

Tue, 24 Apr 2012 18:03:58 -0400

I'm happy to announce that a paper Zhou and I submitted to the 2012 EdMedia conference, "Understanding Usage Patterns of Video-driven Discussion Using Singular Value and Semi-discrete Decomposition", was accepted. A big thanks to Danny, Duncan, Oumar, George and Fred for their hard work on the transcriptions, Demetri, Janet, and Lu for being our relevancy measure-ers, and Pranav, Megha, Hui Soo, and Gary for their help and advice on the paper.

Food, water, shelter, smartphone

Mon, 20 Feb 2012 17:33:56 -0500

On the heels of Cisco predicting there would be more mobile devices than humans in 2012, Nielsen released interesting data on smartphone penetration today. Smartphone penetration is >50% for almost every income level for 18-34 year olds, reaching as high as 80% for rich 25-34 year olds.

80% of people aged 18-24 and 25-34 who bought a phone in the last 3 months chose a smartphone, something we need to keep in mind for everything we develop. What would be neat to see is how many people use smartphones as their primary internet-connected device.

Quantifying the Quality of an Online Discussion

Thu, 12 Jan 2012 10:16:35 -0500

I've been doing some reading on the types of quantitative analyses we can do on some of our Vialogues discussion data and I wanted to share some resources. What we are hoping to do is to come up with a grading system for the quality of a discussion. For the first pass at this model, we've chosen to focus on:

The number and type of topics per discussion
Time between posts
The distribution of posts among discussion participants
The type of post (question, answer, option, elaboration, etc.)

We are planning to include other things like moderator influence as well, but we are figuring out how to put these factors together first, mainly using Latent Semantic Analysis, exponential fitting, and some text parsing. Below are some papers on LSA, categorization of discussion posts, and various work in the field. I didn't have enough attachment space so only the LSA resource is attached, but the rest are linked. I'll be squeezing ideas out of you all to help us develop this model at next week's D&R meeting, but these might be good papers to look at beforehand if you get the chance. Please let me know if you have any thoughts!

Best of: Fred Rossoff

Wed, 28 Dec 2011 22:00:56 -0500

My favorite of Fred's posts is "Mo' College, Mo' Problems." Economic specialization has done wonders for us as a species. But as our knowledge of any field deepens, the amount of information the next generation has to absorb to truly participate in our economy and society grows in turn. As schooling, or at least knowledge, becomes more vital to our survival, the question of how to fund this becomes increasingly important. Both this and the perhaps inefficient BA-for-all movement are essential issues when we consider how to prepare people for an economy that's increasingly high-skill only. Also, I appreciated the Animal Collective song.

Read the entire post below.

Mo' College, Mo' Problems

Two reports released this week take aim at our current higher education system, and get in some good shots.

First, from the think tank “Education Sector” (mentioned before on the EdLab blog), a report that looks at the ratio of total debt accrued by college students to the total number of degrees conferred. The conclusion? “Nationwide, the overall borrowing to credential ratio has risen sharply in recent years, from $13,334 in 2007 to $14,560 in 2008 to $18,102 in 2009. The national enterprise of producing college degrees is increasingly being floated on a sea of debt.” One discovery, relevant to the conversation Skanda and I had this week, is that for-profit colleges have a much worse ratio than traditional higher education institutions.

Survey Sidekick Remix Update

Mon, 12 Dec 2011 23:29:55 -0500

Over the last week Joanna, Demetri, George, Basak and I have been working on a redesign/revival for Survey Sidekick. The major proposed changes fall into two categories: cleaning the UI up and creating rich tutorials on survey creation and analysis.

We've been working on new clutter-free design, separating the tutorial content from the survey design functions of the site, while streamlining the survey creation interface. We have some wireframes of the proposed design that we'd be happy to share if anyone would like to take a look and provide some feedback.

We are also throwing around some taglines/descriptions for the open house on Wednesday (and for front-page of the site) and wanted to see if any of you ad wizards out there had suggestions. So far we have a long and short version of the same idea:

All the survey tools and tutelage you need
or
All the tools and tutelage you need to design, launch, and analyze an effective survey

The long one might be a bit too long, but is more suitable for the front-page of the site. We welcome your rhyming, alliteration, and other word-related powers!