WINTER 2014
CURRY ALUMNI Scholars Help Future Curry Graduates!
In the spring, the Curry School will contact alumni via email with a brief online survey about your current employment and your satisfaction with your education experience at Curry. This data will help the faculty plan future directions of degree programs and allow students to understand in real terms how their work at Curry will prepare them for the job market. Please make sure we have your current e-mail address so that you may help future Curry graduates! Choose your preferred way to send us your email address (if you are not already receiving emails from the Curry School): • Send an email with your name, graduation year, and degree to curry@virginia.edu. • Submit a class note, filling in the preferred email address and class year fields and any other information you would like to share: curry.virginia.edu/ classnotes/submit
Curry Alumni Scholars is published by the Curry School of Education and is sponsored by the Curry School of Education Foundation, P.O. Box 400276, Charlottesville, VA 22904, email: curry-foundation@virginia.edu curry.virginia.edu/scholars-newsletter
A Toe in the Water
A Curry Team Tries Its First Teacher Prep MOOC
W
hen Coursera decided to expand its free massive online open course (MOOC) offerings into teacher professional development, the Curry School opted to join the experiment and see what could be learned from the experience. Our four-week MOOC, called Early Childhood Interactions: Supporting Young Children’s Development, ran this fall to an enrollment of more than 23,000. Only 58% of those students self-identified as current teachers, which was the target audi- /// Screenshot from the Early Childhood ence. The remainder said they were parents, Interactions course. potential teachers, or psychologists or that they worked with young children in other capacities. The course was adapted from a three-credit online course that has been in development for the past three years in the Center for Advanced Study of Teaching and Learning, said Bridget Hamre, CASTL associate director. The MOOC covered a single domain of teacher-child interactions—emotional support— touching broadly on the three dimensions of positive climate, teacher sensitivity, and regard for child perspectives. Video lectures were brief, ranging from 6 to 15 minutes in length. However, the course included abundant classroom video footage of teachers demonstrating positive interactions with preschoolers. The online discussion board stayed active throughout the course, Hamre said. “Participants were very engaged with the content and had lively conversations.” They also helped each other with technical problems, reducing the technical support required of the instructors. All the content was ready before the MOOC began. Hamre said that after the first week of the course—once the students all figured out how to watch the videos—a small team of volunteer faculty and graduate students spent a total of about four hours a week monitoring the discussion board. MOOC students had an optional homework assignment to film themselves teaching so they could observe and reflect on their application of the dimensions covered in the course. Only 500 students opted to complete this assignment, which is not surprising, since no grade or credit provided incentive, Hamre said. “If we ever do this again, we might try offering something like a peer grading option for the video assignment.” Nearly 5,000 students, representing 100 countries, completed the majority of the course. Only 1,781 (48%) of those were from the US, while Greece, India, Spain, the United Kingdom, and Canada each had over 100 students completing the course. Student surveys yielded overwhelmingly positive reviews of the course, with many raving about quality of the video, the logical structure, and the practical content. — see “MOOC” continued on page 3
CURRY ALUMNI SCHOLARS • WINTER 2014
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