MOOCs and Liberal Education

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 ..."

I thought the TV boom was the early one. This makes me think how far back does it go? Correspondence College? This evil thing called "writing"? Will the difference be the two-way feedback in real-time that makes the difference?

Correspondence is different from radio + tv, since it builds in interaction. Perhaps that difference is playing out in the MOOCsphere now.

Pinterest meets MOOCs (or OERs generally, but note the way it's being sold).

Wow... if you try to sign up as an "educator", it demands an .edu email address.

Using the Pinterest model. Interesting. That competes with Diigo.

"to the wealthy nation's desire to educate cheaper with less faculty" is certainly one possibility.

We should be talking to other countries to see what they want before forcing our open American education on them...interesting read.

From the executive director of Quality Matters

I watched most of this. I liked the format of the webinar itself.

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.

Good stuff in here.

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."

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

This likely captures the feelings for many of us.

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

Here's an interactive portal sorting out MOOC data.

This will be good to watch...

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

Impressions on the Mod-Po class.

Wow. Amazing poetry class.

Sounds exciting, doesn't it? And a fine example of a humanities MOOC.