Group items tagged

"There is no need for the university to own the online course you create," Mr. Nelson said, because a contract giving a college the right to use the course should suffice. In claiming ownership of a course, Mr. Nelson said, a higher-education institution asserts the right to update or revise the course as it sees fit, threatening the academic freedom of the course's creator.

"Being a professor will no longer be a professional career or a professional identity," and faculty members will instead essentially find themselves working in "a service industry,"

It also plans to publish a book, with boilerplate language for contracts and faculty handbooks, titled Recommended Principles to Guide University-Industry Relationships

PD courses will likely be shorter, lasting only three to four weeks.

Beginning this summer, Coursera will offer K-12 teacher development courses for free, courtesy of partnerships with seven "traditional" ed schools including College of Education at University of Washington, John Hopkins University School of Education, Relay Graduate School of Education and others, along with more recreational institutions like the American Museum of History, The Museum of Modern Art, and the Exploratorium.

The cost to run these PD MOOCs are expected to be lower than what Coursera's "mainstream" college partners pay, which typically range from $10K-$50K for each 10-week course

Veronica: one we move away from institutional limitations, all kinds of limitations – payment, platform, credit – then we can focus on what works best – and then we can look at things like disaggregation of the course, modularization of the course, etc. Michael: sure, one of the greatest services MOOCs have provided has been to reawaken the imagination. Let’s invest in trying some things, lift some constraints and see what happens. Phil: It’s already having an impact. It’s really people rethink and get past the Carnegie unit, the seat time.

At Illinois, We’ve had the experience of very large enrollment traditional classes. So an experience in a MOOC can help us learn how to manage an on-campus class of, say, 350. For example, how to manage the discussion forums, especially the graded discussions.

Another thing is that people can submit material for future offerings of the course. We ask them permission, of course. We have tens of thousands of ‘worker bees’ and many of them have been happy to contribute their materials.