Learning math with Iversity

• #public
• Iversity is a German MOOC platform. I had a very interesting learning experience with a math course that they offered, which I wrote up - it made me think about the idea that E: Asynchronous static materials can foster rich interactive learning #E
  • Nothing was stopping me from just going to the next video and getting the answer - no technology, AI, quiz etc. But I thought it was fun. So I spent a few hours exploring, drawing different ways. People uploaded all kinds of images of drawings (which made it feel much more personal), lot's of different approaches, some even wrote Python programs to test hypotheses, etc. When we continued the course, seeing the discussion and results was incredibly interesting because we had engaged so deeply with the problem.
    • This is a great example of productive failure. However, E: Some pedagogies only work for self-motivated students, and E: How to know the optimal time to explore during self-directed learning #E
• Iversity
  • is a German MOOC provider which was in the news a while ago because they promised a bunch of scholarships (I think 25000 EURO) that professors could apply for to make courses (independent of their universities). Anyway, I began looking at a course about mathematical thinking in German, which is very well done. Always interesting to see how different platforms are organized.
  • The platform
    • seems quite similar to EdX, with the icon bar on the top that mixes videos, quizzes, texts etc.
    • But the thing I really liked is that it has comments right below the videos (don't remember if EdX does this).
      • For example, in this video they ask people about their ideas and attitudes towards math, and asked us to draw our view of math. Right below the video you see a lot of people posting, even some drawings - everything from people who hate math, to people who speak it fluently... I thought this was very nice - made the MOOC seem a lot more social, than the discussion forums in Coursera which are so disconnected from the content, and always seem very disorganized etc.
• Very long screenshot
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• Here's another screenshot, from when the course really started - we're proving the binomial theorem using geometry (it's very nice how they integrate algebra and geometry), and people are uploading tons of examples, things they draw on the computer, taking photos of worksheets, writing code to explore etc... Not only are the videos really well made, and fun, but the contributions from other students are really rich and make me understand the material much better (there's lots of research showing that getting students used to seeing multiple representations of the same concept promotes deeper understanding).
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