Best MOOCs for BPM professionals

http://bpmtips.com/best-moocs-for-bpm-professionals/#comment-749

Massive Open Online Courses allow you to learn new things in a way which fits your schedule. They are often organized by best educational institutions/experts in the world. And did I mention they are free? If you want to learn more about MOOCs there is aBPTrends article on this topic.

Below you can find list of the BPM-related courses that I participated in (and recommend) or the ones I am currently signed up for. For all of them you can sign up now and learn new BPM skills in 2015.

To make it easier for you to select proper MOOC I asked the course authors to answer the following question:

“Who should participate in this course and what are the key takeaways?”

Fundamentals of BPM

Authors: Marcello La Rosa, Marlon Dumas (Queensland University of Technology)

URL: https://moocs.qut.edu.au/learn/fundamentals-of-bpm-october-2015

The “Fundamentals of BPM” MOOC is the first course that offers a comprehensive overview of the BPM lifecycle, from process identification all the way to process monitoring and mining, covering along the way process discovery, analysis, redesign and automation. It’s open to anyone who has an interest in improving organizational performance. It will be useful to those who have already worked in BPM and would like to consolidate and expand their learnings. But given that no prior knowledge is required, this course also provides a great learning opportunity for those professionals and students who are new to BPM. This is achieved by combining a gentle introduction to the subject with more advanced topics that deepen the content. Last but not least, the variety of learning media (short videos, interactive activities, quizzes, readings, interviews, project work) will ensure following this MOOC is fun!

Concretely, through this course you will learn:

– How to prioritize business processes

– How to design the right process model for a given purpose

– How to combine qualitative and quantitative analysis methods

– How to spot issues in a process from ten miles away

– How to turn around the process to make the most out of automation

– How to make process execution data speak out for itself

Process Mining: Data science in Action

Author: Wil van der Aalst (Eindhoven University of Technology)

URL: https://www.coursera.org/course/procmin

The course is intended for anyone interested in Data Science and Business Process Management, i.e., the analysis of operational processes based on factual data. There is a need for Data Scientists that look beyond the data and see that the key issue is to analyze and improve processes.  Process mining is an essential tool for any data scientist. Moreover, Business Process Management experts need to consider the data in a process-oriented way. If not they will become dinosaurs …

In daily life many events are being recorded, e.g., ordering a book, making a phone call, checking in and taking a medical test. This provides an amazing source of information that can be turned into valuable insights using process mining. Process mining can be used to automatically learn behavioral models that show what people and organizations really do. The hype around Big Data is too much focused on the “data” (storage and processing) and not on the “processes” that we would like to learn and improve. The course “Process Mining: Data science in Action” offers a novel perspective on data (Big or Small) and provides the tools necessary to start analyzing real behavior based on event data that we can find in any organization.

The course explains the key analysis techniques in process mining. Participants will learn various process discovery algorithms. These can be used to automatically learn process models from raw event data. Various other process analysis techniques that use event data will be presented. Moreover, the course will provide easy-to-use software, real-life data sets, and practical skills to directly apply the theory in a variety of application domains.

Introduction to Operations Management

Author: Christian Terwiesch (The Wharton School University of Pennsylvania)

URL: https://www.coursera.org/course/whartonoperations

Business MOOCs are for everybody who has an interest in getting access to the educational content from the top b-schools, but, be it because of cost, time, or location, is not able to enroll for a residential, on-campus program.

What did you want the last time you went to a restaurant? You wanted to find something on the menu that you liked, you wanted the meal to be prepared according to high quality standards, you wanted to get it quickly, and you didn’t want to pay too much money for it. Now, remember the last time you went to a doctor’s office or a hospital. What did you want the doctors and nurses to do? You wanted them to provide the right care for you, you wanted the care delivered with great quality, you wanted to get the care quickly, and you (or your insurance) didn’t want to pay too much for it.

The management skills needed to run the operations of a restaurant are the same needed to run a hospital. You will learn these skills in this course. Specifically, you will learn how to improve productivity, increase responsiveness, provide more choice to the customer, and deliver higher quality standards. In short, you will learn how to analyze business processes and how to improve them.

Introduction to Lean Sigma Quality

Author: Brian Coll, John Donovan (IT Sligo)

URL: http://itsligo.ie/study-at-it-sligo/open-and-distance-learning/introduction-to-lean-sigma-quality/

This free six week course in Lean Sigma Quality is recommended for all those in an organisation who are involved in business improvement projects to reduce costs and improve quality. It is suitable for managers, change agents, project managers, team leaders and team members who may be involved in Six Sigma projects.

Lean Sigma Quality is the foremost quality process improvement approach for companies in the manufacturing and service industries. Lean Six Sigma has been around for more than two decades and since then it has been embraced by leading global companies in the manufacturing and service industries. It has become the leading process improvement approach for organisations that wish to attain world class performance in quality and customer satisfaction. The tools and techniques are now expanding to the healthcare and government sectors where benefits have been achieved in productivity, efficiency and elimination of ‘waste’ – a term used in Lean Sigma quality which refers to anything that does not add value to the product or service.

Introduction to C++ and DirectX Game Development course

If you’re an experienced Game Developer and want to build on your C++ and DirectX skills, up-level your employment options with AAA companies​, and expand on the DirectX knowledge you gained in the Introduction to C++ and DirectX Game Development course, now's your chance!

In this first in a series of in-depth C++ and DirectX game development trainings, popular experts Bryan Griffiths and Mickey MacDonald build on the prototype from the previous course and show you how to port old DirectX 11 programs to the new Windows 8 landscape. Explore cube maps and skyboxes, create a worldscape and render images, and make a skydome in DirectX. Take this opportunity to build your engine development and coding skills!

Source Code: https://github.com/ScruffyFurn/SumoDX2

Instructors | ​ ​Bryan Griffiths - Software Engineer & triOS College Video Game Design and Development Instructor; Michael "Mickey" MacDonald - Microsoft Technical Evangelist

https://mva.microsoft.com/en-US/training-courses/cdirectx-game-development-skyboxes-and-porting-dx11-to-112-8684?l=0ZzNeQH1_2204984382

Introduction / Getting Started

Take a look at where the intro course left off and where this series will go with the prototype. Investigate the new developments that might be useful in Visual Studio 2013, and get a quick peek at the other external tools needed for this course.

​DirectX Changes for Windows 8.1 Development

Explore what has changed in the DirectX 11 landscape with the move to Windows 8, and then look at the steps required to port an older DirectX 11 game or program to the new landscape.

Creating Skybox Resources

Learn about cube maps and how to develop a suitable one for use as a skybox. Get familiar with the tools to create the worldscape, render out the required images, and then see how to stitch the images together in another program to create a .dds file.

Creating a Skydome in DirectX

Create the classes required to support the skydome within the framework. Take a look at how to manipulate the Rasterization State and Depth/Stencil State to draw the skydome in an optimized way, plus see other tweaks to make the effect feel more lifelike. 

Recommended Resources & Next Steps

Take this opportunity to dive deeper into C++ and DirectX, at your own pace.

Learn

• Introduction / Getting Started
• ​DirectX Changes for Windows 8.1 Development
• Creating Skybox Resources
• Creating a Skydome in DirectX
• Recommended Resources & Next Steps

Prerequisites

None

Time requirements, modules, assessments and points for this course:

2 hours* 5 modules 4 assessment

*Excluding labs, knowledge checks and assessments.

Statistics for Applications

Statistics for Applications

Provider: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Description: This course is a broad treatment of statistics, concentrating on specific statistical techniques used in science and industry. Topics include: hypothesis testing and estimation, confidence intervals, chi-square tests, nonparametric statistics, analysis of variance, regression, correlation, decision theory, and Bayesian statistics. Note: Please see the syllabus for a description of the different versions of 18.443 taught at MIT.

Author: Prof. Richard Dudley

Date Published: 2016-01-19T01:17:14.062282

Categories:
All/Mathematics and Statistics

Languages: English

MOOC's Here. Are Our Teachers, Colleges Ready?

BENGALURU: "How many of you here don't know what a MOOC is," asked IIM-Bangalore director Sushi Vachani at a session with faculty members from differentB-schools across India on Feb 13, Saturday . One hand went up. 

For V Murugaiah, a professor of management at the Davanagere University , MOOC or massive open online courses(MOOC) is a new concept he learnt about at the IIM-B campus. "Our education system has teachers in all age groups. It's difficult for someone like me to catch up because MOOCs have not entered our university system yet," he said. IIMB, the first management school to offer MOOCs, threw open its doors to train over 100 faculty members from 50 B-schools on MOOCs and how they can be blended with class room teaching.The day long workshop was an eye-opener for many like Murugaiah. 

IIMB offers 15 MOOCs on the IIMBx platform through edX, a not-for-profit online initiative of Harvard and Massachusetts Institute of Technology . "We have lots of b-schools but their quality leaves a lot to be desired. The evolution of MOOCs challenges our understanding of education," said PD Jose, chairperson of IIMBx. "But there is a problem of mindset." MM Sulphey, a professor from Kerala-based TKM Institute of Management, agreed. "For me, to develop a MOOC will be difficult. My institute may not support me because they are expensive," he said.Lack of infrastructure was a bigger challenge, he added. Vanita Shastri, dean of undergraduate programs at Ashoka University in Haryana, described MOOCs as the new frontier of education. "It is up to the universities and institutes to use cutting-edge technology so that their students will stand to gain," she said. 

Many universities now want to incentivise learning through MOOCs. "We have mandated students to take up at least two MOOCs as part of their regular course, for which they will be given credits," said Srikanth Deshpande, an assistant professor of management at Christ University. 
IIMB now plans a second workshop on MOOCs in the second week of March at Delhi.

What should MOOC quality standards look like?

By Meris Stansbury, Managing Editor, @eSN_Meris
Read more by Meris Stansbury
February 12th, 2016

Research delves into issues when trying to gauge instructional and design quality in MOOCs for credit.

As more institutions consider offering MOOCs for credit, often the MOOCs provided by third-party platforms, researchers say it’s imperative to gauge instructional and design effectiveness…but how, and with what quality standards?

These are the main questions posited by Patrick Lowenthal, assistant professor at the Educational Technology College of Education at Boise State University; and Dr. Charles Hodges, associate professor  of Leadership, Technology & Human Development at Georgia Southern University, in their research studyon trying to measure the quality of MOOCs.

The researchers explain that as institutions look to third-party (Coursera, edX, Udacity, etc.) provided MOOCs for credit, it’s important to investigate whether these MOOCs meet certain standards of quality. The problem is, very little research has been done to investigate the instructional quality of MOOCs.

“Due to this problem, we decided to investigate the design of MOOCs as determined by certain, accepted online course quality frameworks,” write the authors in their study. “We began this study with an assumption that MOOCs, just like formal online courses, are not inherently good or bad. Further, there are likely some things that members of the academy can learn (both good and bad) from analyzing MOOCs.”

Where to Start?

Though there are many quality assurance programs for online courses, such as California State University Chico’s, or the Online Learning Consortium’s (OLC) Five Pillars, Lowenthal and Hodges decided to use INACOL’s Quality Matters (QM), since it is the “only quality assurance/standards framework…that focuses on both online teaching and online course design,” they explain. “While other rubrics focus on measuring quality teaching online, the most popular quality assurance frameworks focus on online course design but not online teaching.”

The study notes that QM is a peer review and faculty development process that is centered on eight general standards (each of the standards has a number of related and more specific sub-standards):

• Course overview and introduction
• Learning objectives
• Assessments and measurement
• Instructional materials
• Learner interaction and engagement
• Course technology
• Learner support
• Accessibility

In order to pass QM’s standards, a course must receive an 85 percent and meet all of the essential standards. Yet, none of the six MOOCs chosen (2 from Coursera, 2 from edX and 2 from Udacity) by the researchers passed the initial review. However, one Coursera MOOC and one edX MOOC scored very well overall in terms of total points. The Udacity courses (both self-paced and offered year-round) performed the worst.

“The fact that all six MOOCs did not pass a QM review does not suggest that all of these MOOCs were poorly designed,” emphasize the researchers. “In fact, all six MOOCs met…specific review standards.”

For example, Lowenthal and Hodges found that all six MOOCs studied introduced students to the purpose and structure of the course; had the instructor provide an appropriate and available self-introduction; provided assessments that measure the stated learning objectives and are consistent with course activities and resources; provide students with multiple opportunities to measure their own learning progress; employed accessible technologies and provided guidance on how to obtain accommodation; provided course tools and media to support student engagement and guide the student to become an active learner; etc. (For a complete list of all the standards and sub-categories met,

However, all six MOOCs also failed to meet the following standards:

• The module/unit learning objectives describe outcomes that are measurable and consistent with the course-level objectives.
• Course instructions articulate or link to the instruction’s accessibility policies and services.
• Course instructions articulate or link to an explanation of how the institution’s academic support services and resources can help students succeed in the course and how students can access the services.
• Course instructions articulate or link to an explanation of how the instruction’s student support services can help students succeed and how students can access the services.

“It is not surprising that none of these MOOCs performed well [on Standard 7: Learner Support],” say the researchers, as this standard focuses on students attending a course for college credit. “MOOCs, for the most part, are not designed as for-credit college courses. Rather, they are designed as professional development exercises.”

Yet, the researchers contend that many MOOCs could easily be updated to address Standard 7.

But should QM act as the measurement standard for credit-bearing MOOCs?

The Challenges with MOOC Quality Standards

Lowenthal and Hodges emphasize that though QM is a comprehensive and well-adopted quality measurement for online learning, MOOCs are a breed of their own, and come with a set of unique challenges in measuring their instructional and design quality.

First, the researchers point out that MOOCs are not known for their high-quality learning activities and learner interactions, so technically a course could meet QM standards, but still be a relatively boring course. “Thus, perhaps more differentiation needs to be made between a quality course and a truly high quality or exceptional course.”

Second, not all MOOCs provided by third-party platforms are designed to offer the same type of learning experience (self-paced vs. facilitated).

Third and final, MOOCs often have a “similar instructional approach that relies heavily on professionally-produced videos, readings and quizzes, all with minimal instructor contact.” Though production value helps, the researchers say that there might be limitations to the QM rubric if such simply designed courses can pass a review and be deemed “quality” courses. The QM rubric might focus too much on the basics, like learning objectives, and not enough on instructional approaches for “active engagement, communication, and collaboration.”

Lowenthal and Hodges emphasize that though the study sampled a very small number of courses, and therefore, the results of the study should be viewed in this context, it’s also important to remember that this data can serve to “advance our discussions about MOOCs beyond mere hyberbole,” they conclude. “For instance, can MOOCs meet the same design requirements as other for-credit online courses? If not, where do they fall short? Questions such as these are important as institutions struggle with offering credit for completing MOOCs.”

The researchers also hope this study has the possibility of informing and further evolving online quality assurance systems, like QM, by analyzing MOOCs—a non-traditional format of online learning.

For much more detailed information, including methodology, ratings on QM for each course studied, the choice to exclude cMOOCs and more, read “In Search of Quality: Using Quality Matters to Analyze the Quality of Massive, Open, Online Courses (MOOCs).”