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Article in The Chronicle of HE, December 17, 2012 "Coursera and its devotees simply have it wrong. The Coursera model doesn't create a learning community; it creates a crowd. In most cases, the crowd lacks the loyalty, initiative, and interest to advance a learning relationship beyond an informal, intermittent connection." Excerpt: Interactivity and customization are the fundamental advantages of online education. By using technology, we can bridge geographic divides while creating a continuing learning relationship between faculty and students, students and students, and students and the greater society. "Our goal should be to design a customized program that matches technology with a student's day-to-day objectives, not just course objectives or weekly learning objectives. We need to operate on a small scale where the online course or program is calibrated to meet the need of the individual student." Excerpt: "The MOOC model is fine for the informal student or academic dabbler, but it is not the same as attaining an education. Whether face to face or online, learning occurs when there is a thoughtful interaction between the student and the instructor. If the goal is attaining knowledge for a purpose beyond mere curiosity, then the model for online learning has to be a more complex, interactive experience. For that reason, we should be happy to cede the territory of the massification to Coursera. The business school at my institution is developing an online M.B.A. program that emphasizes the critical nature of interactivity in learning. Our next step is to design a dynamic and agile customization component that emphasizes student preferences while advancing the objectives of our institution. We are looking for partners who want to build a platform that allows for profound customization. We want to bring together institutions interested in thinking deeply about the promise of online education for delivering a remarkable learning experience, one that equals-

Interesting POV about how lack of bridging assistance in MOOCs may fall unduly heavily on learners who are not able to integrate ideas with their life experience. Quote: "Daphne Koller, promotes the "personalized" learning that a MOOC can offer. Coursera can track how each learner uses the course material and how his or her quiz performance correlates with given in-course behaviors. With that information, Coursera can guide students toward the activities that will best help them to learn: additional video lectures or a specific discussion-forum thread. I cannot customize each student's education as precisely as Coursera claims it can. But I can personalize it, in the sense that I can help students connect what they learn in my class to who they are as people-their biographies, aspirations, shortcomings. MOOC creators assume that learners' intellects are detachable from their broader life circumstances. You take the MOOC, but you're on your own in figuring out how your learning fits into the rest of your life-or how it might require changing your life. That's fine if you just need to know about analog circuits to work on a specific project. But people come to universities at all ages, with unsettled identities and life plans, or with plans that education itself will unsettle."

I just signed up for this as it looks really interesting. A Professor at Duke, Cathy N. Davidson has created a MOOC about MOOCs and the future of learning, which also is part of a global initiative to examine this topic. Here's the link to the inside Higher Ed article about it: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/11/04/duke-u-professor-plans-massive-collaborative-effort-tackle-challenges-facing-higher Davidson is the co-founder of the Humanities, Arts, Science and Technology Alliance and Collaborative, or HASTAC. The MOOC will track the origins of what has become accepted features of higher education, from majors and graduate programs to grades and multiple choice tests, and evaluate new forms of teaching and learning. At the same time, students in affiliated face-to-face courses in disciplines as different as African and African-American studies, gender and sexuality studies, and film studies will contribute to a centralized wiki. The end result could be a massive collection of ideas on how to change higher education.

MIT and Harvard have teamed up to offer MOOCs, and this month Stanford, Princeton, U of PA, U of MI have created a new commercial company, Coursera, with $16 million in venture capital.

This goes with the recent buzz on our Moocs. Here's the NYTimes article on the formation of heavy-hitter Moocs. It appears the Harvard MIT collaborative is also a research project on how people learn online, which could be interesting.

Article identified on Stephen Downes' home page, Juy 20, 2012. Excerpt "Although MOOCs share the common characteristics of being large courses open to anyone, there are two main types, one called an "x MOOC," and another called a "connectivist MOOC." The companies and partnerships that fall into the "x MOOC" include Coursera; an MIT and Harvard partnership called EdX, and a new venture founded by three roboticists called Udacity. Other universities follow a connectivist MOOC model developed by George Siemens, Stephen Downes and Dave Cormier in 2008. What's the difference between the two? Connectivist MOOCs are more social and focused on deriving meaning of the learning experience with others, Virginia Commonwealth's Becker said. And they allow students to participate through blogs, RSS feeds and other decentralized methods, said Downes, a senior researcher for Canada's National Research Council. By contrast, x MOOCs emphasize content mastery, centralizes courses on one website and uses automated grading tools to support hundreds of thousands of students. But regardless of the category, MOOCs as a whole will change how universities offer courses, Downes said. And they're not going away. "Universities can't just keep doing what they're doing and hope this whole online thing goes away," Downes said."

Interesting link from Steven Downes' Daily about where education and venture capital funding are colliding. According to Clarence Fisher, a classroom teacher blogger, most venture capital funding is not going to increase technology learning and future learning, but is going to reinforce the "basics". He exempts Coursera, but Downes questions them somewhat, too.

Interesting article on where venture capital is going in education-not to online, DIY, make your meaning kinds of learning but to reinforce basic skills learning.

Very interesting transcript of interviews with two Wharton professors on impact of MOOCs on their MBA programs. "So, in the last year, when I've taught product design, I've posed to myself the challenge: What can we do in the classroom that can only be done when 60 people are together sharing the same time and location? I have them watch the video offline, and then when we get together, we do a simulation or an exercise or presentations or group work - things that can only be done in that location when we're all together." Excerpt on completion rate: Knowledge@Wharton: Despite the evident advantages, one of the challenges that all MOOCs face is that the completion rate typically tends to be pretty low. I wonder both as teachers and as researchers, what you have learned through your experience that might be relevant to business schools? Ulrich: The completion rate statistic is a red herring. People like to trot it out, but it doesn't seem terribly relevant to me. If you think about what the barrier is to registering for a MOOC, it's literally one click in a Coursera environment. So many people enroll to check it out, to watch a few videos, to see what it's all about. Sponsored Content: My MOOC requires hundreds of hours of effort to complete a substantial design project. Very, very few people are willing to put in hundreds of hours, but many people are interested in learning a little bit about customer needs or aesthetics in design or prototyping, so they watch a few videos. We think pretty carefully in MOOCs about three categories of learners. Those who are just browsing; those who want to view the material but won't do the work; and then those who will do all of the work. So as I say, that narrow completion statistic is not meaningful in terms of evaluating the success of the MOOCs.

Very interesting articles on how MOOCs and people completing them are building respect for their accomplishment with employers. Also an interesting point by Thrun on '"there are a huge number of willing and eager lifelong learners that are underserved" by higher education.'