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"Can You Really Teach a MOOC in a Refugee Camp? - Wired Campus - Blogs - The Chronicle of Higher Education August 1, 2014 by Steve Kolowich Two men living in Dadaab, a refugee camp in Kenya, would watch lecture videos and take online quizzes at a nearby United Nations compound. (InZone) One narrative that has driven widespread interest in free online courses known as MOOCs is that they can help educate the world. But critics like to emphasize that the courses mostly draw students who already hold traditional degrees. So when Coursera, the largest provider of MOOCs, published a blog post about how a professor had used one of its online courses to teach refugees near the Kenya-Somalia border, it sounded to some like a satire of Silicon Valley's naïve techno-optimism: Hundreds of thousands of devastated Africans stranded in a war zone? MOOCs to the rescue! Details of the experiment paint a more nuanced picture, one that highlights the challenges MOOC providers face in trying to change the lives of downtrodden people. Barbara Moser-Mercer, a cognitive psychologist at the University of Geneva, ran the refugee experiment and wrote Coursera's optimistic blog post about it. But in an interview with The Chronicle, as well as a more formal article she wrote about the experiment for a European conference on MOOCs, the professor expanded on the logistical issues that come with trying to make sophisticated online courses work in deprived settings."

"March 20, 2013, 4:55 am By Steve Kolowich The State University of New York's Board of Trustees on Tuesday endorsed an ambitious vision for how SUNY might use prior-learning assessment, competency-based programs, and massive open online courses to help students finish their degrees in less time, for less money. The plan calls for "new and expanded online programs" that "include options for time-shortened degree completion." In particular, the board proposed a huge expansion the prior-learning assessment programs offered by SUNY's Empire State College. The system will also push its top faculty members to build MOOCs designed so that certain students who do well in the courses might be eligible for SUNY credit. Ultimately, the system wants to add 100,000 enrollments within three years, according to a news release."

""A mook? What's a mook?" asks "Johnny Boy" Civello, the fast-talking gambling debtor in Martin Scorsese's 1973 film Mean Streets. For years, "mook" existed in English as an obscure slang term referring to "a foolish, insignificant, or contemptible person" (as Merriam-Webster's Online defines it). According to one Scorsese biographer, Vincent LoBrutto, the term first appeared in 1930 in the work of S.J. Perelman, the well-known writer and humorist. Since then it has occasionally resurfaced-in Mean Streets, for example; and again, around 2000, to classify an emerging class of poor, angry white kids who listen to rap metal. But that particular monosyllable was rarely at the tip of anyone's tongue. Until recently, that is, when college professors began broadcasting their courses to a worldwide audience. They called their courses "MOOCs," which stands for massive open online courses and is pronounced "mooks." Suddenly, that unfortunate syllable could be heard everywhere: in the news and the blogs, at tech conferences and faculty meetings, in legislative hearings and policy proposals. Now, it has been formally enshrined into the English language. Oxford University Press this week inducted "MOOC" into its Oxford Dictionaries Online. The definition: "A course of study made available over the Internet without charge to a very large number of people.""

Vedi anche i commenti all'articolo.

"Most people who take massive open online courses already hold a degree from a traditional institution, according to a new paper from the University of Pennsylvania. The paper is based on a survey of 34,779 students worldwide who took 24 courses offered by Penn professors on the Coursera platform. The findings-among the first from outside researchers, rather than MOOC providers-reinforce the truism that most people who take MOOCs are already well educated. The Penn researchers sent the survey to students who had registered for a MOOC and viewed at least one video lecture. More than 80 percent of the respondents had a two- or four-year degree, and 44 percent had some graduate education."

Ma vedi anche il commento di Stephen Downes http://www.downes.ca/cgi-bin/page.cgi?post=61414 : "Goodness gracious, the word "MOOCs" does not mean the same thing as "courses offered by Penn professors on the Coursera platform." The Chronicle can be so infuriating at times. Coursera very deliberately targeted an upmarket customer profile, so no wonder that's who they got"

Descrizione di una ricerca sull'efficacia dei MOOC

(di Anna Lisa Bonfranceschi | Pubblicato il 22 Novembre 2013 . Alla fine: Via: Wired.it ( http://daily.wired.it/news/internet/2013/11/21/mooc-corsi-gratuiti-chi-frequenta-290384.html ) Credits immagine: World Bank Photo Collection/Flickr ( http://www.flickr.com/photos/worldbank/ ) L'articolo di Wired.it è lo stesso per il testo ma le illustrazioni sono diverse. Inoltre è sotto una licenza Creative Commons BY-NC-ND, mentre quello di galileo.net è sotto copyright stretto. Per l'articolo di Ezekiel J. Emanuel su Nature, del 20 novembre 2013, vedi http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v503/n7476/full/503342a.html : abstract e possibilità di comprare la versione completa, oppure di visualizzarla gratuitamente). Annarita, scusa la parentesi aggiunta sopra: mi serve per un post che sto rimunginando sulla traduzione di ipertesti. Sul fondo: la cosa buffa è che Emanuel aveva scritto un ditirambo sui fondatori di Coursera ad aprile, http://time100.time.com/2013/04/18/time-100/slide/andrew-ng-and-daphne-koller/ , concludendo: "After I taught my first class through Coursera, I got this beautiful postcard from Sri Lanka in the mail, thanking me. I just thought that was crazy and amazing. There's no chance I would have reached that student just by what I was doing before." E quella cartolina di cui andava così fiero, cfr. anche http://www.post-gazette.com/news/education/2012/11/20/College-of-Future-Could-Be-Come-One-Come-All.print Per un'altra recensione di "Online education: MOOCs taken by educated few" di Emanuel , cfr. http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/moocs-are-reaching-only-privileged-learners-survey-finds/48567 di Steve Kolowich, 20 nov. 2013.