Addressing the Challenges of a New Digital Technologies Curriculum: MOOCs as a Scalable Solution for Home : Annual Conference 2014

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Wed, Sep 3 2014, 10:30am – 11:30am

Description

Download the full paper. Read the Editorial for the Special Issue of Research in Learning Technology (conference research proceedings).

England and Australia, have introduced new curricula, teaching the computer science to children from the first year of school. This is a significant milestone that also raises a number of big challenges: the preparation of teachers and development of resources at a national scale. Curricula change is not easy for teachers, in any context, and to ensure teachers are supported to implement new curricula, scaled solutions are required.

One emerging technology that has gained traction for delivering content to large-scale audiences are massively open online courses (MOOCs), however, little is known about what constitutes effective MOOC design; particularly within professional development contexts. To prepare teachers in Australia, we decided to ride the wave of MOOCs, developing a MOOC to deliver free computing content and pedagogy to teachers with the integration of social media to support knowledge-exchange and resource building. The MOOC was designed to meet teacher needs; allowing for flexibility, ad-hoc interactions, support and the open sharing of resources. In this paper we describe the process of developing our initiative, from the ground-up, so that others encountering similar national changes and reforms, may learn from our experience.

Authors:

Rebecca Vivian, Alan Barnes, Ruth Geer, Denise Wood

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