Group items tagged

"Last month in a blog post titled "Better Than a Textbook?", I noted that some faculty find it easier to think about the massive open online courses (MOOCs) provided by vendors like Coursera as "super-textbooks" than as actual courses. Earlier this month, Vanderbilt computer science professor Doug Fisher wrote a guest post for the blog ProfHacker titled "Warming up to MOOCs," in which he described his experiments in using MOOCs in this fashion."

The open-source educational marketplace will give everyone access to the best universities in the world. This will inevitably spell disaster for colleges and universities that are perceived as second rate. Likewise, the most popular professors will enjoy massive influence as they teach vast global courses with registrants numbering in the hundreds of thousands (even though "most popular" may well equate to most entertaining rather than to most rigorous).

"Over 49,000 students registered for the class, over 16,000 attended the first week's lecture, and over 4,900 students earned a certificate at the end of the 10-week course. It would take 32 years of teaching our SI 502 foundations course on networked computing to interact with that many students."

"These dual characteristics of "open" are also core to Open Educational Resources (OER). Hewlett's updated OER definition begins: "OER are teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use and re-purposing by others." That is, for an educational resource to be "open" it must be both gratis (available at no-cost) and libre (everyone has the legal rights to repurpose the resource). An OER cannot be freely available or openly licensed - it must be both freely available and openly licensed (or in the public domain) to be an OER."