Coursera pivots to address additional markets. I don’t think the company’s vision has changed, but their strategy has. While previously planning to work only with ‘elite’ institutions , Coursera has cast a wider net to include several state systems. “[Coursera co-founder Daphne] Koller said she realized that state systems educate about 70 percent of the students in the country. So, Koller said, her desire to improve education in the United States needs to involve state systems.” Seeming to line up with Michael Feldstein’s view that MOOCs, Learning Management Systems (LMS), and textbooks are converging toward the same destination (increasingly personalized courseware), some institutions view Coursera as a replacement for services now provided by LMS vendors while others see Coursera courses as “this generation’s textbook”.
Like this: Like Loading... U Wisconsin Pilots Online Flex Option, 100 Students Could Earn Free Credits. Distance Learning | News U Wisconsin Pilots Online Flex Option, 100 Students Could Earn Free Credits By Dian Schaffhauser01/07/13 The University of Wisconsin System is experimenting with a new "flex" program that allows non-traditional students to obtain course credits through massive open online courses (MOOCs), online classes, and assessment. The first 100 students to participate in a pilot program may receive those credits free. A major component of the initiative is to encourage progress toward a degree based on assessments of competency in a subject area, not seat time in a classroom. That competency could come from work experience, free online courses, and other experiences. The Flexible Option, announced in the fall by U Wisconsin System President Kevin Reilly and the U Wisconsin Extension program, will launch with two three-credit courses--college algebra and elementary statistics.
According to the university, students who show mastery can finish in as little as two weeks. Udacity - Educating the 21st Century. Coursera's fee-based course option. Coursera will offer a fee-based pathway with identity verification for students who want to earn a more meaningful certificate of completion, the company said today in an announcement that also sheds light on an emerging business model for the largest massive open online course (MOOC) provider.
University partners and Coursera will jointly issue certificates under the fee-based option, affixing their powerful brands to them but not issuing credit for the courses. Fees will range from $30 to $100, with an initial group of 5 courses getting the deluxe treatment. However, company officials said most Coursera offerings would include the fee-based variety by the end of the year. The for-profit Coursera has enrolled more than 2.2 million students so far in its 213 free online courses, which are taught by professors at 33 prestigious universities. A free option will remain in place for all of Coursera’s offerings, and students who can't afford fees can apply for aid.
Free or Fee? Education startup Coursera partners with 12 new universities, raises $3.7M and hits 1.5M students. As we wrote back in April, there’s no doubt that the Internet is revolutionizing education, as more and more companies continue to emerge and alter the way we learn. We’ve kept a close eye on edX, Khan Academy, Academic Earth, P2PU, Skillshare and Codecademy, and rounding out that list is Coursera, one of the youngest of the bunch, which recently raised $16 million to launch with 37 undergraduate and graduate-level courses. Now, since starting off with the likes of Princeton and Stanford, Coursera is announcing 12 new university partnerships, $3.7M in equity investments from Caltech, Penn and existing investors, and a total of 1.5M student users from 190 different countries.
Update: Coursea has clarified that 1.5M refers to the number of course enrollments, and that there are currently around 680,000 registered students. As far as funding goes, this additional $3.7M brings Coursera’s total funding to “over $22 million. . ” ➤ Coursera. Despite courtship Amherst decides to shy away from star MOOC provider. After months of wooing and under close scrutiny, edX was rejected this week by Amherst College amid faculty concerns about the online course provider's business plans and impact on student learning. Amherst professors voted on Tuesday not to work with edX, a nonprofit venture started by Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to provide massive open online courses, or MOOCs.
In interviews, professors cited a wide range of reasons for rejecting edX -- which currently works with only 12 elite partner colleges and universities -- starting with edX's incompatibility with Amherst’s mission and ending with, to some, the destruction of higher education as we know it. Amherst – an elite liberal arts college where seminars are the norm and professors pride themselves on spending an hour on each student’s paper – has been looking for companies with which it could experiment with online education. Some faculty wanted to expand Amherst’s repertoire and experiment online. ‘Leveraging the best of many worlds’: Thrun rebuts detractor. The Udacity/Georgia Tech/AT&T partnership to provide a low-cost Masters program in computer science has drawn many accolades as well as no small amount of criticism since it was announced six weeks ago. Numbered among the critics is Dr. Christopher Newfield from UC Santa Barbara whose article appeared yesterday in Inside Higher Ed.
Newfield’s analysis of the program’s budget caught the attention of Udacity’s Sebastian Thrun, who graciously attempted to clear up some misunderstandings. He wrote that [Newfield's] “analysis is misleading. The bulk of the initial costs arise from course digitization costs, and they are amortized over many years and a much larger number of students.
The limited enrollment of 200 in Year 1 is a precautionary step so we can debug the program and improve it before opening it up more broadly. Newfield apparently also neglected to factor in the presence of variable costs. Like this: MOOC: Massive Open Online Course | A First for Udacity: Transfer Credit at a U.S. University for One of Its Courses - Technology. By Katherine Mangan A Colorado university is announcing on Thursday that it will give full transfer credit to students who complete a free introductory computer-science course offered by the online-education start-up company Udacity. The announcement, by Colorado State University-Global Campus, is a milestone for the Stanford University spinoff. This is the first time a university in the United States has offered academic credit for a Udacity course, although several universities in Austria and Germany already do.
The course, "Introduction to Computer Science: Building a Search Engine," teaches basic computer-science skills by having students build a Web search engine similar to Google. In order to earn the three transfer credits toward their bachelor's degrees at the Global Campus, students will need a "certificate of accomplishment" from Udacity showing they passed the course. CS101 is Udacity's first course and includes appearances by the company's co-founder, Sebastian Thrun. Mr. Student persistence in rigorous Massive Open Online Courses. Only 7,000 out of 155,000 students who registered for the inaugural offering of the edX MOOC Circuits & Electronics went on to pass the class. By surveying students who were still in the course near the end, researchers gained a snapshot of that demographic, the large majority of whom ultimately passed the course. 80% indicated they had taken a comparable course at a traditional university.Nearly two-thirds indicated the edX course was better.96% indicated they had previously taken calculus.About 30% did not have a Bachelor’s degree.Age groups represented by percentage: 18-25 (45%), 26+ (50%), High School (5%) The research would seem to indicate that students who had previously taken traditional university courses and who had taken calculus were more likely to persist.
Like this: Like Loading... The Problems with Peer Grading in Coursera. When I wrote about the launch of online education startup Coursera back in April, one of the things that most intrigued me was the description that founders Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng gave of their plans for a peer-to-peer grading system. I’ve been a critic of the rise of the robot-graders — that is, the increasing usage of automated assessment software (used in other xMOOCS and online courses, as well as in other large-scale testing systems).
While some assignments might lend themselves to being graded this way, I’ve been skeptical that automation is really the way to go for disciplines require essay-writing, despite the contention that robo-graders score just as well as humans do. Coursera said it would offer poetry classes (a modern poetry class starts this fall), and I just couldn’t see how even the most sophisticated artificial intelligence in the world could grade students’ intepretations and close readings. So Coursera’s plans for peer assessment sounded pretty reasonable. Companies Create MOOCs To Fill Skills Gaps - Education - Online. Try college for free this fall at ETSU. If you’ve ever wanted to earn that bachelor’s degree but were afraid to commit to a full-fledged degree program, now you can try out college for free at East Tennessee State University.
ETSU administrators announced Tuesday the establishment of the Open Buccaneer University Course System (OpenBUCS), wherein anyone will be able to take U.S. history since 1877 and introduction to music at no charge beginning this fall. ETSU President Brian Noland said the OpenBUCS program is compatible with the school’s history and mission.
“We as an institution are on the cutting edge of national change,” he said. “We always have been and we always will be. “Over the past decade we’ve seen a transformation both in terms of the size and volume of this institution but a transformation in higher education in general as we’ve evidenced the evolution of online instruction.” Noland pointed out that 8,332 students enrolled in online courses at ETSU this past fall. Can Freshman Composition be MOOC-ified? Freshman composition is one of the foundational courses that most incoming students need to tackle. It’s also one that requires more feedback from the instructor: Students that haven’t been prepared to write at the college level are shepherded through the intricacies of style, diction, and more.
While artificial intelligence is nowhere near advanced enough to help students become better writers, peer grading may be a sufficient proxy for an instructor’s feedback. I’m curious to see how this Gates Foundation-funded MOOC evolves. Like this: Like Loading...