The Real Problem with MOOCs | So Raven. MOOC, or massive open online course, is a hot topic these days. There is a great deal of excitement over what some see as the future of higher education, and for good reasons. It is a new yet familiar chapter of the Internet’s crusade against the old, the inefficient, and the undeserved monopolies of the pre-digital economy. We see in the music industry that digital technology tilts the balance of power towards the consumer. Pink Floyd’s former manager Peter Jenner attacks the debundling of music albums as turning “a £10 product, the album, into a £1.60 product, the two singles that are worth buying.” In a similar fashion, MOOCs threaten to debundle higher education. It seems that if greater access to education is good (and it is), then we should embrace MOOCs. Benefits of MOOC So, online education has at least one intrinsic advantage: cost.
The MOOC Debate Boston Review recently published a series of articles that lend voices to both sides of the MOOC divide. The Long-Term Conclusion. Forthcoming event in London. University of London and Regent’s University London 11 – 12 December 2013 This conference takes as its starting point current developments in online learning and explores how they may impact on three aspects of international higher education: student mobility, how qualifications are gained, and international partnerships and networks. Even before MOOCs, students could pick from courses for which degree credit was awarded by a different institution. And the manner in which MOOCs are now being adapted for credit will have implications for the volume and patterns of international student mobility and the acquisition of qualifications. Both of these developments will impact on the formation of international alliances and networks.
The draft programme can be seen HERE. The registration form is HERE. A fuller description is HERE. Keynotes will be delivered by Rt Hon David Willetts MP (Universities minister), Sir Michael Barber (Pearson), and Professor Nigel Thrift (Warwick). More information. Coursera brings online learning offline in India. Massive Open Online Course provider Coursera has teamed up with the US State Government in order to take its learning offline too.
The course provider has launched Global Learning Hubs with which Coursera users will be able to access the Internet and work with others in a group for free. The US Department of State has been named as a major Learning Hubs partner as well as Overcoming Faith Academy Kenya and Digital October. Bluebells School International and Lady Sri Ram College for Women of India have been named as partners too. These partners will be bringing Learning Hubs to more than 30 embassies, American Spaces, campuses and other physical locations worldwide. Coursera to bring offline learning to cities all over the world “At Coursera, we envision a future where everyone has access to a world-class education. Coursera has announced that it is actively looking for additional partners to host learning Hubs within their own communities apart from the ones in the existing cities.
Community. Mooc.org: Google EdX online-classes partnership is "YouTube for MOOCs" Screenshot / Mooc.org Google is teaming up with EdX, an open-source online education nonprofit started by Harvard and MIT, to create a new site that EdX’s president compared to a “YouTube for MOOCs.” The site is called mooc.org—MOOC being the unfortunate acronym for “massive open online courses.” It will use the same EdX platform through which professors at Harvard, MIT, and other EdX-partner universities now offer their online courses.
But it will be open to everyone, including businesses, governments, and private individuals as well as professors at non-EdX colleges. Meanwhile, Google will also become a partner in developing the Open EdX platform itself—that is, the open-source technology that allows professors to conduct their courses online. Earlier this year Stanford also announced it would partner with EdX to develop the platform, a significant move coming from the university that had birthed perhaps the two best-known for-profit MOOC startups, Coursera and Udacity. Documents shed light on details of Georgia Tech-Udacity deal. The Georgia Institute of Technology’s plan to offer a low-cost online master’s degree to 10,000 students at once creates what may be a first-of-its-kind template for the evolving role of public universities and corporations.
When it agreed to work with Udacity to offer the online master's degree in computer science, Georgia Tech expected to make millions of dollars in coming years, negotiated student-staff interaction down to the minute, promised to pay professors who create new online courses $30,000 or more, and created two new categories of educators -- corporate “course assistants” tasked with handling student issues and a corps of teaching assistants hired by Georgia Tech who will be professionals rather than graduate students.
New details about the internal decision making and fine print of Georgia Tech's revolutionary effort are based on interviews and documents, including some that the university provided to Inside Higher Ed following an open records request. U.S. Teams Up With Operator of Online Courses to Plan a Global Network. The learning hubs represent a new stage in the evolution of “massive open online courses,” or MOOCs, and address two issues: the lack of reliable Internet access in some countries, and the growing conviction that students do better if they can discuss course materials, and meet at least occasionally with a teacher or facilitator.
“Our mission is education for everyone, and we’ve seen that when we can bring a community of learners together with a facilitator or teacher who can engage the students, it enhances the learning experience and increases the completion rate,” said Lila Ibrahim, the president of Coursera. “It will vary with the location and the organization we’re working with, but we want to bring in some teacher or facilitator who can be the glue for the class.” “Some of them took it above and beyond, and decided to host facilitated discussions with the courses,” said Meghann Curtis, the State Department’s deputy assistant secretary for academic programs. I’m a MOOC. NovoEd, the platform through which Stanford produces some of its classes has begun proffering Learning Teams to help support smaller group, comparably-aligned peer connection, idea brainstorming and review. It’s a good idea, but for the Design Thinking course, even though my aptly named Higher Ed Innovation team was made up of students with similar backgrounds, jobs and educational experience, as one of six in the group, I was the only one to complete the course—which is actually higher than the average MOOC course completion rate of less than 7 percent.
Learning Teams, since they are self-selected, can’t yet provide useful metrics for student intent or commitment. My experiences have really got me thinking about what MOOCs are actually good for. We are told over and over that they will be the future of education—an opportunity for any student to study and learn at some of the most prestigious schools in the world. Star professors start their own 'university' and don't ever plan to make money. Tyler Cowen, a star economics professor at George Mason University, isn’t interested in making money off the online university he co-founded last fall.
Instead, Cowen and Alex Tabarrok, who also co-write the popular blog Marginal Revolution, have a simple motto for their growing series of online courses, branded as Marginal Revolution University: “Learn, Teach and Share.” “We think learning on the Internet, like blogs, is not something you can charge for,” Cowen said. Many others, of course, have -- about one-third of enrolled American college students take online courses, scores of colleges of colleges and universities have readily charged those students for the online courses they offer, and now startups, like Coursera, are looking to make money off online classes, too.
But Cowen and Tabarrok are aiming for a less-affluent global audience and have reached into their own pockets to back the university, which they have no plans to monetize. Cowen wants to expand that audience.
UK enters global online university race. 18 September 2013Last updated at 11:58 ET By Sean Coughlan BBC News education correspondent Online student Saurabh Kumar: "The best thing is flexibility" The UK's biggest online university project has been launched, with more than 20 universities offering free courses. Students will be able to follow courses on mobile phones as well as computers. The UK's project, called FutureLearn, sees UK universities entering the global market in so-called Moocs - massive open online courses.
It could "revolutionise conventional models of formal education", says universities minister David Willetts. Mr Willetts, speaking at the British Library, said that the expansion of access to higher education was no longer necessarily about "bricks and mortar". He said that the FutureLearn partnership would help to serve the unmet demand for university courses, particularly overseas. The British Library, British Museum and British Council will make material available to students. 'Social architecture' Global race. MOOCs - massive open online courses: jumping on the bandwidth | Science. Mooc CC By Mathieu Plourde, 2013 #digedcon #moocposter These are trying times for researchers across the globe, and I think it matters not whether one is in the UK, US or anywhere else; the lack of funding is impacting science in many ways, and not for the better.
Scientists are running scared, funds for research are becoming scarce, labs are closing, tenure is being denied. I do my best not to project negativity to the burgeoning scientists (students and post-docs) in my own lab, but they are bright enough to understand what is going on: they see that a career in science is a never-ending fight to keep going. Ultimately, this is leading to the attrition of talented young scientists from the academic track. But life as an academic scientist is comprised of the triple-threat: research, teaching and service (administration). And it appears that the life of science educators is also hanging in the balance. MOOCs are on the move. So what's not to like? Another serious concern is evaluation. MOOC | Search Results. Mooc.org: Google EdX online-classes partnership is "YouTube for MOOCs"