After I went to Emory University in Atlanta, and spoke at IBM Impact in Las Vegas this week, I attended a one day of a planning session for an edX course at UT Arlington, in Texas.
George Siemens (@gsiemens) invited me out to for the planning session, which included folks edX, Tableau, Google and of course UT Arlington. I gave a one hour talk on APIs, a talk I had originally prepared to be about APIs in higher education, but after listening to the discussion for a couple hours, I crafted an entirely new talk.
The planning session was called "DesignJam for edX MOOC on Data, Analytics, and Learning”--which was all about developing an online course around data and analytics, where pulling information via APIs would play a central role.
Originally I was focused on evolving the edX platform using APIs, something I will be exploring more after talking with the folks from edX. However, in the end, I focused on how we could teach hundreds, or potentially thousands of students, about using APIs as part of a wider data and analytics class.
The session at UT Arlington ended up being a great experience, thinking about the potential of APIs for edX, what a class about data and analytics using APIs would look like, and a full day of hanging with some really interesting academics, while getting an opportuity to observe the process around planning in this fast growing world of online courses.
Just like with the domain exploration at Emory University, experience at IBM Impact in Vegas, I have a lot of notes to process, and I’m sure I’ll have more to say about what happened in Texas.
