MOOCs and Liberal Education

Fascinating reflections and issues. I wonder what a better platform would look like.

"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."

Interesting list.

Important research on using MOOCs as class content.

Critical analysis of MOOCs using video./

During any given semester at a liberal arts college like Wellesley, students may experience what will prove to be a transformational moment in their lives. A pre-med student from El Paso might come to Wellesley and publish research with her biochemistry professor.

When talking with some of our "senior faculty", this meme keeps coming around.

I'm not sure if the market has room for another player. But p2p learning is potentially a big differentiator.

Here's an interactive portal sorting out MOOC data.

This will be good to watch...

This likely captures the feelings for many of us.

Very interesting development. For instance, compare Amherst with Wesleyan.

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."

Good stuff in here.

Cathy Davidson is one of the prominent voices out there right now taking a considered, balanced approach to MOOCs - I'm a little surprised she hasn't come into our conversations earlier. :) I especially like her point here, one this group has heard before, that it's alright to both be severely critical of MOOCs in their current form and be strongly interested in experimenting with them in the hopes of developing a much more robust future form.