A joint MIT and Harvard University report, one of the largest investigations of massive open online courses to date, provides new insights into MOOC behaviors: many teachers enroll, learner intentions matter, and cost boosts completion rates.
Locast is an innovative platform for sharing and discovering location-based user-generated videos and production quality multimedia content provided by RAI TV. It consists of a combination of mobile and wearable computing elements supported by a distributed Web application. Content gathered from RAI TV’s historical archives and user-generated media are linked to physical locations in Venice in order to be accessible to all those visiting the space.
The project focuses on the uniqueness of the Italian cities’ heritage superimposing a layer that corresponds to the shared media-based memory of the recent Italian past: the RAI Archives. By taking advantage of the interactivity provided by new media, RAI offers a powerful feedback channel to users, which allows users to generate their own media, create their own stories and, finally, to participate in the media production process.
Locast offers to users the tools to build personalized itineraries, download the content in proximity of Points of Interests and watch them on their handsets in order to improve the overall tourist experience. Users can also perform a number of other actions such as contribute with new videos to Locast repository, follow recommended media itineraries, modify them and share experiences with their social network.
Locast explores location-based narrowcasting potential and actively engages the users to participate in the media production/consumption process together with a historical institution such as RAI TV. It shifts the innovation from the wide-spread concept of Web2.0 to the promising scenario of Space2.0 that keeps the physical and social qualities of the Italian cities and augment them with the potential offered by pervasive computing.
A. Ho, J. Reich, S. Nesterko, D. Seaton, T. Mullaney, J. Waldo, and I. Chuang. Ho, AD, Reich, J., Nesterko, S., Seaton, DT, Mullaney, T., Waldo, J., & Chuang, I.(2014). HarvardX and MITx: The first year of open online courses (HarvardX and MITx Working Paper No. 1), (2014)