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"August 5, 2012 by Tony Bates TED Talks: Daphne Koller: What we're learning from online education Daphne Koller, one of the two founders of Coursera, describes some of the key features of the Coursera MOOCs, and the lessons she has learned to date about teaching and learning from these courses. The video is well worth watching, just for this. However I'm probably going to suffer the same kind of fate of the Russian female punk band, Pussy Riot, by spitting on the altar of MOOCs, but this TED talk captures for me all that is both right and wrong about the MOOCs being promoted by the elite US universities. Let me start by saying that I actually applaud Daphne Koller and her colleagues for developing massive open online MOOCs. Any attempt to make the knowledge of some of the world's leading experts available to anyone free of charge is an excellent endeavour. If only it stopped there. What I object to is the hubris and misleading claims that are evident in this TED video. As someone once said about one of Sigmund Freud's lectures, what is new is not true, and what is true is not new."

Importante analisi fatta da uno specialista dell'insegnamento a distanza, tutto all'inizio di Coursera

January 9, 2013 by Jeffrey R. Young "...Setting the Price The company also revealed more details about how it would award certificates and how much it would charge for them. Students who want a verified certificate will have to decide early in the course and pay upfront. Paying that fee will put students on what the company is calling the "Signature Track." The company and colleges are still struggling to decide what to charge for the certificates, though in its latest announcement Coursera said the price would run $30 to $100. "It's a huge decision: You're essentially setting a market," said Daphne Koller, a co-founder of Coursera, in an interview this week with The Chronicle. "No one has ever priced this before." Officials also stressed that they would offer financial aid to students who demonstrated that they could not afford the fees but could benefit from the verified certificates. Ms. Koller said Coursera would continue to offer free unofficial certificates to students who passed some of its courses. So why would someone pay for the verified certificates? Peter Lange, provost at Duke University, which plans to offer one of the courses in the new pilot, said each free certificate would have a clear disclaimer on it: "It says something to the effect of, We cannot vouch that the person who got this document took the course or did the work." The new Signature Track could mean serious revenue for Coursera, and for the 33 partner colleges that will get a cut of it. Exactly how the colleges will divide that revenue is still being worked out, it seems. Mr. Lange said the question was on the agenda at the next monthly meeting of Duke's Advisory Committee on Online Education." So, when Coursera staff offered free Statements of Accomplishment as "Recognition" to the volunteers of the Global Translator community, they did so in full awareness of their lack of value and of the mentioned disclaimer

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.