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I love this article! thanks so much, Juan. It is helpful on multiple levels. It's no easy thing for a large university to scope out a plan for integrating online education. It's a brand new world and it feels very high risk. As we learn about best practices and our budgets get trimmed, the temptation is to do enough to check the box, but that model causes more trouble in the long run. Lucas's article is a thoughtful, articulate review of lessons learned that can be applied straight away. Thank you!

Schools as a business are running out of funding, yet tuition keeps getting more expensive (funny right?). I don't know if the current platform for education will be replaced with MOOCs, but it will definitely be replaced, it's natural evolution. Jennifer you are working with Virtual High Schools, soon we will see this in the lower grades. The strange kids we knew who and were jealous of because they were "Home Schooled" will be the norm! However we are not only talking about the "survival" of the institutions, we are talking about the titles that come with these degrees. 50 years High School was a family achievement, today High School doesn't qualify you to stand on the side of the highway with a sign... How long before these titles like M.Ed are no longer worth the paper they are printed on?

I believe the University of Miami Online High School has already offered a MOOC about college/ACT prep. I'm bummed because I was hoping to be the first high school to offer a MOOC. I really just love the idea of using technology to give kids opportunities that they would not have otherwise had. But there are practical considerations that trump my idealistic ideas about it. It's always about the money. I think one of the biggest problems we face in our society today is the concentration of wealth at the top. Higher and higher salaries at the top necessitate lower salaries (greater tuition, etc.) elsewhere. We also have huge infrastructure/insurance costs. It's a complex, complicated problem that makes me weary!

The beauty of a MOOC is that you can literally run it from your parents basement! Look at how Khans Academy started and what it has grown into. Any one of us could essentially develop an online course, videos and all and run it from our home. Although I was just introduced to MOOCs in last semesters 6329, I see them becoming more and more integrated into future curriculum. It would not surprise me if at one point the 6332/6358 course required the development of a fully functional MOOC. Remember I said it first!

Welcome to day 3 on Survival and this MOOC is all about Survival.... I hope that Dr. Butler doesn't mind the liberty I took with this week's topic...

I love this about MOOCs. My son is interested in music, but most definitely not interested in school. He's got his eye on a MOOC about Beethoven and another about music theory. This is, I believe, the way of the world, or at least a hallmark of our current generation. They only want to learn about what they want to learn about. Will foundational learning go away? with some vigilance, no. But will students of the future get to better direct and specialize their learning, yes! And, in my opinion, that's fantastic!

I am glad that you hit on that point, that the coming generation(s) may not be a strict towards following a learning regiment. I have noticed at least with my children that they learn what they want to learn and will dig further it catches their attention. I was personally taking a MOOC on Comic Books and Graphic Novels from Coursera! Who would have thought you would find a course on that? I do not believe any institution will ever have the flexibility of MOOC, the problem may be that a MOOC may never have the resilience of a University. I know we have talked about "Badges" as opposed to Paper Degrees and I think MOOCs will help make that a reality.

In my humble opinion, regardless of what we are taught at school and are supposed to learn, we only learn what we are actually interested in or have some emotional connection with. In a way, MOOCs just emphasize this tendency.

I love it! It seems that infused within the course are bits and pieces of different subjects which might lead people to other learning topics. MOOC's are something I want to look into, but have not yet taken the 3 or 4 hour a week I don't have to explore. Who knows what I will be exploring this summer.

MOOCs are great in that you will always find one on something that catches your interest. Most of them are not as clinical as the university courses we take, but offer enough complexity to keep you interested. I hope you do find a course that not only helps you out but perhaps allows you to bring something new to the classroom.

I think MOOCs are great when enrolled in something that interest you. I once took a MOOC course and did not meet my expectations. Also, it could've been that it was my MOOC course and was not accustom to these sort of courses. I really look forward to enrolling in another MOOC course in the near future.

You are correct in that higher education is having to adapt to more technologically experienced students. It is really difficult for a student of that caliber to go into a classroom that is taught with a blackboard and chalk. You have hit it on the nail with Rule #4 about boring things, teachers and instructors do need to "step it up" in order to keep these new students engaged.

Juan, you are correct. Instructors need to step it up and use more of technology to engage students. The problem with this that many instructors are not tech savvy and want to continue using the old teaching strategies. Some of this faculty are intemediated to use a computer; using other devices would drive them insane.

I agree Juan. Many of my students are coming back to tell me that their college classes are basically the same as when we went to college. All lecture based and you never really get to know your professor. In some inservice we had I saw some youtube videos about students that are leaving college because they re not learning anything new in the classes. They could learn everything online if they wanted too. Colleges might have to make some changes if these MOOC or other online classes dip into their attendance base.

My apologies for starting a new topic and THEN reading this one. The overlap is great! I am glad, though, to have the Forbes article to reference in addition to the one I supplied from the NYT. This sentence from the article caught my attention in particular, "The beauty of teaching analytics is that teachers will have real time information on how students learn and can augment future plans accordingly." For my research project I've been interviewing administrators from online high schools. A couple of them have mentioned how incredibly valuable it is to have analytical data, such as the amount of time a student spends on a page, site, assignment, or test as well as all the concrete test and assignment data to identify where they struggle. One principal told me that when she surveyed her teachers last year, she heard two things again and again, "You'll have to pry the computer out of my cold, dead hands before I go back to in-class instruction," and "You have broken me and I won't be able to return to a brick-and-mortar setting where I don't have the ability to gather data like I do in an online setting" This particular school (Mountain Heights Academy) has a focus that is heavily data driven and student-centered. She told me, "Teachers are skeptical at first, but have really come to see how much looking at the data allows them to create personalized instruction that can make all the difference in learning for the kids."

This is a very interesting article and quite thought provoking. I should start by saying that I love MOOCs. I have taken a dozen classes at different MOOCs and most of them have been very high quality. Teachers are passionate about the topic they are teaching because they are normally topics they don't get to offer at their universities for a number of reasons. Some of the courses even offer undergraduate credit hours. I don't think they represent any threat to the standard university program and, for the most part, my impression is that students who take these courses do it for the sake of learning.