Open courses are a sociocultural phenomenon.
This phenomenon represents symptoms, responses, and failures facing Higher Education. In this talk, George will examine open courses and MOOCs from a variety of angles and discuss the degree to which MOOCs have portrayed education as a product that can be packaged, automated, and delivered, and empirical research on the design and development of pedagogical and intelligent agents that may be used in MOOCs.
George gave some background on his blog.
Pete Evans liveblogged the lecture.
Bio: Dr. George Veletsianos is a Canada Research Chair in Innovative Learning and Technology, and Associate Professor at Royal Roads University in Victoria, BC, Canada. Formerly, he was an assistant professor in Learning Technologies at the College of Education at the University of Texas at Austin and lecturer at the University of Manchester. Veletsianos studies emerging technologies and pedagogies. His research aims to understand learners’, educators’, and scholars’ practices and experiences in emerging online settings (e.g., social networks and open learning environments). His research and design/development work have been funded by the Canada Research Chairs program, the National Science Foundation, the European Union, the National Geographic, and the Swedish Knowledge Foundation. He blogs at http://www.veletsianos.com.