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"By Carl Straumsheim March 6, 2015 1 Comment Massive open online course provider Coursera this week drew the ire of some translators on Twitter after claiming "that the quality of the Coursera's Global Volunteer Translator Community... is better than a professional translator." The roughly 5,600 volunteer members of the community help translate lecture video subtitles. After a number of critical tweets, including from Coursera critic Paul-Olivier Dehaye, the MOOC provider deleted the tweet. Coursera later apologized in its Global Translator Community newsletter. Dehaye chronicled the exchanged on Storify."

"Datenschutz beim MOOC Die Technische Universität wie die Ludwig Maximilian Universität in München gehen mit der Zeit und bieten ihren Studenten Online-Kurse an. Dabei setzen sie auf die kalifornische Online-Plattform Coursera, nach eigenen Angaben mit 140 angeschlossenen Universitäten der größte Anbieter von Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC). Coursera sorgte für Schlagzeilen, als der Schweizer Professor Paul-Olivier Dehaye von Coursera wissen wollte, über welche Datensätze Coursera von seinem Kurs und von seinen dort eingeschriebenen Studenten verfügt und was mit diesen Daten gemacht wird. Coursera weigerte sich und geriet darob in Streit mit Dehaye wie mit seiner eigenen Universität (Zürich). Auch in Deutschland gab es Aufregung um Coursera, als die Datenschützerin Marit Hansen die Datenschutzregeln von Coursera kritisierte. Schließlich werden nicht nur die Kurse, sondern auch die Studenten-Daten in den USA gespeichert und ausgewertet. In den Augen der Big Brother Jury ist dabei nicht nur das Verhalten von Coursera fragwürdig, sondern das der Universitäten, die auf Coursera setzen. Es sei schlimm genug, wenn Bildung zum Wirtschaftsgut verkomme und ein US-Anbieter womöglich zum Bestandteil des Pflichtstudiums samt Scheinwerwerb werde. "Falls es keine geeignete europäische Plattform für das Angebot von MOOC gibt, wäre es eine Sache der Unis, eine solche Plattform aufzubauen," wird die Preisvergabe an die Münchener Universitäten in der Kategorie Bildung begründet."

"for cooperating with the online learning provider Coursera. (...) We regard this cooperation of the Munich universities with Coursera as a marketing operation. The two universities can present themselves globally together with top international universities. Conversely, Coursera adorns itself with their names. It seems that data protection has not been given much thought. Likewise, we miss a critical discussion of who owns the content produced and who profits from it. By the way, taking Coursera courses is still voluntary for the students. This BigBrotherAward is meant as a warning to colleges and universities not to make participation in MOOCs offered by privacy-ignoring companies a mandatory way to earn study credits. Actually it's bad enough that education increasingly becomes a commodity as publicly financed institutions of higher education distribute their offerings via commercial providers. If an appropriate European MOOC platform does not exist, then it is the the universities' duty to create such a platform. By giving a BigBrotherAward to TUM and LMU Munich, we would like to remind both universities and all other education institutions that the long-term business model of such "education providers" hinges on contracts in which the students are not the customers of the MOOC provider, they are the product being sold."

"The US Department of Justice's (DOJ) Civil Rights Division is doing everything that it can to make the web and information technology (IT) more accessible to people with disabilities. One of the most effective ways to achieve this goal is by following up on complaints submitted by citizens who feel their rights to use the internet are being denied by an organization's inaccessible technology. A landscape portrait featuring Berkeley's Campanile tower in the foreground and a rainy San Francisco Bay in the background That's exactly what happened when, in October 2014, the DOJ began investigating the free, public MOOC (Massive open online course) system offered by University of California, Berkeley when deaf and hard of hearing individuals complained they could not access the audio and video content on the site. On August 30, 2016, the DOJ submitted a 10-page letter to the administration at UC Berkeley stating that they had found the university's MOOC content to be in violation of Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) which protects disabled people from discrimination. Legal Context: How Are MOOCs Subject to Accessibility Laws? The laws surrounding free online course content accessibility are not explicit."

L'articolo descrive il contesto e gli aspetti giuridici del confronto sull'accessibilità tra Dipartimento della Giustizia US e l'Università di Berkeley.

"UC Berkeley announced Wednesday that it would restrict public access to existing educational content after a Department of Justice (DOJ) investigation concluded that many of the video captions did not meet standards of the Americans with Disabilities Act. Campus will instead invest in developing new online content with necessary accessibility features, according to campus spokesperson Roqua Montez. Montez said that because of limited viewership of more than 20,000 course capture videos and a projected cost of at least $1 million for captioning, campus decided not to revamp the videos deemed inaccessible. "On average, the older videos were watched for less than 8 minutes," Montez said. "(It) doesn't make sense to go back and do that, given the budget climate we are in. We had to weigh that as a factor.""

Articolo sull'annuncio di Berkeley del ritiro dalla visibilità pubblica dei video non conformi ai requisiti di accessibilità

" We look forward to continued dialog with the Department of Justice regarding the requirements of the ADA and options for compliance. Yet we do so with the realization that, due to our current financial constraints, we might not be able to continue to provide free public content under the conditions laid out by the Department of Justice to the extent we have in the past. In many cases the requirements proposed by the department would require the university to implement extremely expensive measures to continue to make these resources available to the public for free. We believe that in a time of substantial budget deficits and shrinking state financial support, our first obligation is to use our limited resources to support our enrolled students. Therefore, we must strongly consider the unenviable option of whether to remove content from public access. Please know that we fully intend to exhaust every available option to retain or restore free public availability of online content. It is our hope that we will find an appropriate resolution with the Department of Justice that allows us to serve the extended seeing- and hearing-impaired community and continue to provide free online content."

Risposta di Berkeley alla lettera del Dipartimento di Giustizia US sulla non conformità dei materiali di corso con i requisiti della legge.

"Fair Use, MOOCs, and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act: Frequently Asked Questions In October 2015 the Librarian of Congress issued new rules permitting certain teachers of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) to break encryption on DVDs, Blu-Ray discs and streaming videos to create short clips for use in their teaching. It's a major step forward for MOOC teachers and their students. This document, prepared by Professors Peter Decherney and Brandon Butler, answers some of the most common questions you might have about the new rule."

(Per il contesto, vedi http://infojustice.org/archives/35654 e http://ipclinic.org/2016/01/22/fair-use-moocs-and-the-digital-millennium-copyright-act-frequently-asked-questions/) Parti problematiche: Coursera and Udacity are for profit companies. Can they take advantage of the exemption? Coursera and Udacity are the platforms. Colleges, universities, museums, and other nonprofit organizations offer courses through these platforms. The organization that creates the course must be an accredited nonprofit educational institution, but the provider of the software platform may be for-profit . So a university course offered through Coursera may take advantage of the exemption. How can the material be restricted to students enrolled in the course? We believe that use of passwords provided only to enrolled students will sufficiently limit access to the course content to students or learners. How can redistribution be prevented? Offering streaming rather than downloadable versions of the course content should reasonably limit unauthorized redistribution of the work. Unfortunately, this unfairly disadvantages learners with slower internet access" Cioè l'autorizzazione a far saltare i blocchi anticopia vale soltant per i MOOC che non sono MOOC perché non sono Open ma protetti da password. E l'argomento secondo il quale il fair use vale per i video di corsi Coursera e Udacity, a patto che gli enti che elargiscono il corso non siano a scopo di lucro, anche se le piattaforme lo sono, è dubbio. in effetti Coursera e Udacity traggono profitto dai materiali proposti da questi enti. Quanto all'offerta dei video in solo streaming per impedirne lo scaricamento: almeno nei corsi Coursera dove il link di scaricamento è stato t

"Recent headlines around a high-profile settlement between the US Department of Justice and edX, Inc., one of the largest and earliest distributors of MOOCs, have once again highlighted the importance of understanding the rules for making online courses and services accessible to those with various types and levels of disabilities. While much of the media coverage of the edX settlement has focused on the fact that the government sued so high-profile-and respected-an online provider, to date there has been little recognition that the enforcement action may signal an effort to extend the ADA's accessibility requirements not only to a broader range of non-institutional entities providing web-based instruction, but also to those that provide other education-related services."

"Colleges and universities, left and right, are launching Massive open online courses (MOOC). Colleges failing to follow are "behind the times". Do not be fooled by how savvy MOOC advocates sound. They do not understand what they are doing. Let us start with how they do not even understand what a MOOC is, or should be. MOOCs are supposed to be open platforms. It is right there in the name. Downes' original MOOCs were indeed open. Yet the actual MOOCs that colleges publish are closed platforms, as per Wikipedia's definition: ..."

"Dhawal Shah Oct 15, 2014 Coursera is an education platform that partners with top universities and organizations worldwide to offer courses online for free. It was started by two Stanford professors in late 2011. In less than three years it has reached 10 million students around the world and raised $85 million in venture capital. Why have VCs invested so much money in the company? How does offering free online courses generate revenue? Many have asked, so we examined Coursera's different monetization models and offer estimates based on some known numbers. "

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

"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

Tentativo di vedere quali dei corsi Coursera che offrono soltanto la certificazione "Signature Track" a pagamento sono e non sono disponibili per la traduzione nella Global Translator Community di Coursera 14 signature-track-only couses not on GTC: - New World, New Map: GPS for Today's Music Industry https://www.coursera.org/course/gpsmusic . West Virginia University - Re-Enchanting the City - Designing the Human Habitat https://www.coursera.org/course/city . UNSW Australia - Pre-Calculus https://www.coursera.org/course/precalculus . University of California, Irvine - The American South: Its Stories, Music, and Art https://www.coursera.org/course/south . The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill - Foundations of Virtual Instruction https://www.coursera.org/course/virtualinstruction . University of California, Irvine - Forensic Accounting and Fraud Examination https://www.coursera.org/course/forensicaccounting . West Virginia University and Association of Certified Fraud Examiners - What's Your Big Idea? https://www.coursera.org/course/bigidea . The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill - The Magna Carta and its Legacy https://www.coursera.org/course/magnacarta . University of London - Introduction to Environmental Law and Policy https://w

8 signature-track-only courses on GTC: - The Art of Teaching History https://www.coursera.org/course/teachinghist . Rice University - What a Plant Knows (and other things you didn't know about plants) https://www.coursera.org/course/plantknows . - The Fall and Rise of Jerusalem https://www.coursera.org/course/jerusalem . Tel Aviv University - The Power of Macroeconomics: Economic Principles in the Real World https://www.coursera.org/course/ucimacroeconomics . University of California, Irvine - Learning How to Learn: Powerful mental tools to help you master tough subjects https://www.coursera.org/course/learning . University of California, San Diego - Learning to Teach Online https://www.coursera.org/course/ltto . UNSW Australia (The University of New South Wales) - Developing Innovative Ideas for New Companies: The First Step in Entrepreneurship https://www.coursera.org/course/innovativeideas . University of Maryland, College Park - The Emergence of the Modern Middle East | Coursera https://www.coursera.org/course/modernmiddleeast . Tel Aviv University

"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."

"MOOC.Well, what's that? The word MOOC is an acronym. I should at least say once what it stands for: Massive Online Open Course. That was the easy part, just to give you those words. Now to give a definition, that's going to be very challenging.For every one of those words, I think it's fair to say that there is a generally accepted understanding of what the word means, but then there is a substantial number of people who challenge that understanding, who try to push it further....

"From Week 1 Lecture Videos of "Teaching goes massive: new skills required" by Paul-Olivier Dehaye See https://etherpad.mozilla.org/pr8ZtLXODg and http://www.elearnspace.org/blog/2014/07/09/congrats-to-paul-olivier-dehaye-massiveteaching/"

"Digital Storytelling (also affectionately known as ds106) is an open, online course that happens at various times throughout the year at the University of Mary Washington… but you can join in whenever you like and leave whenever you need. This course is free to anyone who wants to take it, and the only requirements are a real computer, a hardy internet connection, preferably a domain of your own and some commodity web hosting, and all the creativity you can muster."

""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.""

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