Group items tagged

Some very interesting reflections. Two stood out for me: 1: A missing forum element: "The worst thing was getting behind and being unable to catch up. There was no forum on which to discuss this, and I was not comfortable sharing with strangers," 2. Students wanting talking heads: "the developers of Edinburgh's e-learning course opted against having the content driven by audiovisual footage of lectures delivered to camera, choosing instead to curate open-source online content, including YouTube footage and academic papers. The decision proved unpopular with some students, Knox says, as they had been expecting to see professors imparting knowledge as they would in a lecture theatre."

OpenupEd: a multinational, multilingual European MOOC enterprise: "Courses range from mathematics to economics, e-skills to e-commerce, climate change to cultural heritage, corporate social responsibility to the modern Middle East, and language learning to writing fiction. Each partner is offering courses via its own ..."

Duke faculty reject partnerhsip with other universities to provide online courses. Not really a MOOC but I think all these larger online collaborative efforts are getting the same attention. I think I was most surprised by the last paragraphs...this "controversy" was over 1 proposed class (initially, then 2) offered by a faculty member...

The line which struck me was a quote from the faculty letter in the student newspaper: (students will be) "enjoying neither the advantages of self-paced learning nor the responsiveness of a professor." The temporal aspects of the MOOC are increasingly troubling me. I'd argue that most of the xMOOCs, at least, are not so much "self-paced" as "self-scheduled work within externally set pacing." I'd like to see that addressed in future iterations of these courses. There's a college that has already done this with their online offerings - UCF? Rio Salado? - where canned courses start every week if they make enrollment.

Case study of MOOCifying one MIT class.

Davidson is planning to run a MOOC soon on the history of higher ed, and has promised to blog her progress in its development.  This is the first installment.

Very useful stuff, seeing one MOOC being made.

"the author examines lessons from massive open online courses (MOOCs) for small liberal arts colleges (LACs) in the United States. While some consider MOOCs a threat to LACs, they can also be seen as a provocation to spur small institutions to improve their offerings and assert their place in the higher education landscape. The paper examines how LACs might draw on the best tools, approaches, and structures emerging from the MOOC revolution in order to help students build lifelong learning habits."

Critical analysis of MOOCs using video./

Various existing learning environments could scale to MOOC size and benefit learners by adding the social elements now missing, from citizen science to simulations, games, virtual reality, and augmented reality.