Group items tagged

A new @coursera #MOOC. Can Venture Capital Deliver on the Promise of the Public University? Proposed in Open Letter from Bob Meister (President of University of California Faculty Associations) to Daphne Koller (Coursera Co-founder). It concludes: "Would you be willing to co-teach this course with me? I'm sure that together we could reach a very large audience indeed."

With apologies for pointing to my own stuff, here is my second report from Keith Devlin's "Introduction to Mathematical Thinking" Coursera MOOC. The first report is here: http://tinyurl.com/bqe9jck.

Jenny Mackness on the experience, and some of the pitfalls,mot peer assessment on Coursera (Seb Schmoller has also written about this)

Article in Nature by Sarah Kellogg with a lightweight overview of building a Coursera MOOC

A constructive review by Donald Clark (Ufi Trustee) of one particular Coursera MOOC (with references to one of Edinburgh University's), with a focus on how the interaction design of the course could have been improved.

Interesting article, with nice density maps by Koller, Ng and others, about Coursera participation.

Public page showing Coursera's operational status, with service updates and "uptime/outage" charts. Worth emulating if we possibly can.

Keith Devlin provides detailed insights into his increasing focus on "learning by evaluation" in the third run of his "Introduction to Mathematical Thinking" Coursera MOOC, which starts on 2 September.

Mike Schatz from Georgia Tech spoke at the Trieste MOOC workshop I and Donald Clark also contributed to. Mike's running introductory Physics MOOCs on Coursera, with Gates Foundation support. He spoke very highly of Piazza as a forum platform. This PDF describes its features.

Short paper on characteristics and motivations of learners on Coursera courses. May have some relevance to our learner engagement, though note the comments about possibility that these results may not be generalisable

Interesting sample of findings from use of analytics in xMOOCs

I think this is a cannier- than-many assessment of the MOOC platform situation.

Worthwhile piece by John Duhring commenting on MOOC production methods, and with plenty of emphasis on Keith Devlin's Introduction to Mathematical Thinking. For more on the latter see my http://fm.schmoller.net/2013/06/second-report-from-keith-devlins-itmt-course.html

The comments to this article are (mainly) more interesting than the article itself which is sort of "boilerplate": disruption is coming, first mover advantage matters, business models are thin on the ground.

This piece by Keith Devlin and this one by distance learning stalwart Terry Anderson http://terrya.edublogs.org/2013/11/19/all-moocs-dont-work-for-all-students-are-you-surprised/ between them provide the most constructive and well-reasoned reactions to Udacity's recent change of tack. Alex Usher's "Udacity has left the building": http://higheredstrategy.com/udacity-has-left-the-building/ is also worth reading, though I think he considerably underestimates Coursera's long term profit-making prospects.