Rethinking Higher Ed Open Online Learning - US News & World Report Karen Symms Gallagher is dean of the Rossier School of Education at the University of Southern California. With the rush of pronouncements, you'd think Higher Ed 2.0 is here, all online, all the time. Brick-and-mortar and ivy are passé. Not so fast. Much of what's touted as innovation in traditional higher education falls short for students seeking high-quality online degrees that will serve them in a tough job market. It's worth decoding what's out there and what isn't. Professors at MIT, Stanford, and Harvard and many fine academic minds have put thousands of top-notch college courses online. [Read the U.S. Logging on to these lectures is often like watching through a one-way mirror—albeit for free and, say, with 15,000 classmates. I can't help thinking that the massive open online course explosion so far is a bigger, better delivery system of The Great Courses, which my husband and I have enjoyed for years. [See the U.S. But that's not what worries me about open online courses.
Size Isn't Everything - The Chronicle Review By Cathy N. Davidson James Yang for The Chronicle Review My reading material to and from London recently for the annual open-source programming event known as Mozfest, or the Mozilla Festival, included two glossy magazines focusing on the future of education: the November 19 cover story in Forbes and the entire November issue of Wired UK, an offshoot of the American magazine. Should educators be delighted by this unexpected attention—or very, very worried? A little of both. Let's look at Wired UK first. Featured are both Negroponte 1.0, the editorial that launched Wired in 1993, and the new Negroponte 2.0. Given that such 20/20 foresight is rare, it is worth paying attention to Negroponte 2.0. He also still maintains a position he stated long ago: "Computers are not about computing, but everyday life." If you are a traditional educator, you should be scared. So what's different in 2.0? "Educational reform" is also on the lips of many college presidents and policy makers these days.
The MOOC movement is not an indicator of educational evolution Somehow, recently, a lot of people have taken an interest in the broadcast of canned educational materials, and this practice — under a term that proponents and detractors have settled on, massive open online course (MOOC) — is getting a publicity surge. I know that the series of online classes offered by Stanford proved to be extraordinarily popular, leading to the foundation of Udacity and a number of other companies. But I wish people would stop getting so excited over this transitional technology. The attention drowns out two truly significant trends in progressive education: do-it-yourself labs and peer-to-peer exchanges. In the current opinion torrent, Clay Shirky treats MOOCs in a recent article, and Joseph E. Aoun, president of Northeastern University, writes (in a Boston Globe subscription-only article) that traditional colleges will have to deal with the MOOC challenge. Two more appealing trends are already big. “I believe in everything never yet said.”
What is the theory that underpins <em>our</em> moocs? If you’re even casually aware of what is happening in higher education, you’ve likely heard of massive open online courses (MOOCs). They have been covered by NY Times, Chronicle of Higher Education, TV programs, newspapers, and a mess or blogs. While MOOCs have been around since at least 2008, the landscape has changed dramatically over the past 10 months. In this timeframe, close to $100 million has been invested in corporate (Udacity) and university (EDx and Coursera) MOOCs . And hundreds of thousands of students have signed up and taken these online course offerings. Personally, I’m very pleased to see the development of Coursera and EDx. A secondary focus, for me (and far lower on the scale than the primary one mentioned above), is around the learning theory and pedagogical models that influence different types of MOOCs. In 2008, Stephen Downes and I offered an open online course, Connectivism and Connective Knowledge (CCK08). What is the theory that underpins our MOOCs? 1. 2. 3. 4.
The future of MOOCs MOOCs get a bad rap. Dismissed as prescriptive, or teacher-centric, or unsocial, or something else, it’s like a badge of honour to espouse why you dislike MOOCs. Despite their pedagogical flaws, however, MOOCs provide unprecedented access to quality content for millions of learners. It’s all very well for Apple-owning, organic-buying professionals to cast aspersions, but consider the girl in Pakistan who’s too scared to set foot in a classroom. Consider the teenager in central Australia whose school has only one teacher. Consider the young woman in Indonesia who can’t afford college. Don’t all these people deserve a better education? Sure, the pedagogy may not be perfect, but the alternative is much worse. MOOC proponent George Siemens distinguishes between two types of MOOC: the xMOOC and the cMOOC. The former is the subject of such disdain. In contrast, the latter leverages the connectedness of the participants. 1. 2. 3. 4. No more lazy professors, no more specious journal articles. 5.
MOOC pedagogy: the challenges of developing for Coursera In the summer of 2012 the team of teachers and researchers associated with the MSc in E-learning programme at the University of Edinburgh began developing a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) for the Coursera platform. Launched only a year earlier, this for-profit company founded by Stanford professors Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller has focussed primarily on hosting computer science related courses from big name US institutions. The recently announced partnership with the University of Edinburgh presented the team with an opportunity to engage and experiment with the much-publicised MOOC format, and foreground issues related to the theory and practice of online education itself. Designing for MOOCs Devising a course to utilise the potential educational advantages of the Coursera platform proved, and is still proving, to be a complex undertaking. Firstly there is the issue of digital mimicry. Why do it? E-learning and digital cultures
Massive Open Online Courses: Setting Up (StartToMOOC, Part 1) by Inge de Waard “Any course consists of some basic features: there is a schedule, a syllabus referring to content and possibly learning actions (assignments, self-assessments…), and there is a learning space where course participants can meet and exchange ideas on the subject of the course to enhance mutual learning and experiences. A MOOC is no different, but because it is online, the course spaces are as well.” Setting up courses in the cloud is a trend in online learning. Whether you are a training company, a non-profit trainer, an experienced hobbyist, or an educational institute, at some point you will want to tap into the cloud, attract new learners from around the globe, and start learning collaboratively. In this first part of a six-part series, you will learn about MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses), which are courses in the cloud. You will also learn how to set up the core spaces for MOOCs. What is a MOOC, or course in the cloud? What do the terms in the MOOC acronym mean?
Open Online Courses: Higher Education of the Future? - Techonomy By Eric Rabkin One instructor’s firsthand look behind the scenes of the movement offering online education to the masses. I am “teaching” a MOOC, one of those massive, open, online courses through which Coursera and, more recently, edX offer people around the globe challenging learning experiences through a simple internet connection: video mini-lectures, machine-graded problem sets in some courses, peer-evaluated essays in others, discussion boards, and more. There’s no cost or credit for the “students” yet, but could this point the way to the “schools” of the future? I would guess that in forty-two years of on-campus teaching at the University of Michigan I have worked with between 12,000 and 20,000 students. As soon as most humanities colleagues hear about this course, their first response is, “Good luck grading all those essays.” These people also educate me. I feel a genuine connection with these people as, it seems, some feel with me, just as one does in a traditional classroom.