MOOC 2013

Just a few things collected over the past year or so. Not a mooc link hoarder ;-)

Dark Side of the MOOC t-shirt

Google's MOOC tool

State of Minnesota bans Coursera 

"If you have an exercise bike in the back room, you could be the small selection of people that use it everyday to get fit. But then again, you could be one of many more who bought it in the hope of regular practice but were unable to make it part of your routine. The MOOC or Massive Open Online Course, which has come to prominence this year, often has much the same effect. Students may enrol in the online free courses from prestigious universities in their tens of thousands, but overwhelmingly they bomb out with attrition rates up to 80-90%."

"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."

"Coursera has been informed by the Minnesota Office of Higher Education that under Minnesota Statutes (136A.61 to 136A.71), a university cannot offer online courses to Minnesota residents unless the university has received authorization from the State of Minnesota to do so. If you are a resident of Minnesota, you agree that either (1) you will not take courses on Coursera, or (2) for each class that you take, the majority of work you do for the class will be done from outside the State of Minnesota."

""There are good reasons to be anxious about universities...selling their name in exchange for something, and (suggesting) that the learning is somehow separate, different or less valuable," he said. "If what we've got is not worth anything - is worth giving away free - doesn't that feed into the general suspicion of experts that everyone's voice is equal, especially on the internet?""

"When the Legislature convenes in January, my intent is to work with the governor and Legislature to appropriately update the statute to meet modern-day circumstances," he wrote. "Until that time, I see no reason for our office to require registration of free, not-for-credit offerings." But that may not be the end of the matter. If, down the road, Coursera starts charging for the courses or students can earn credit or certificates for them, the state might reassess its approach, he said.

"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."

"Connecting students, teachers and institutions, through an open, online course network."

"There are 8 possible monetization strategies that MOOC providers like Coursera, or Learning Management System providers could adopt:"

"Minerva is one of the least-publicized but also most well-funded and audacious of the current crop of online education startups. Funded with $25 million from Benchmark Capital-one of the well-known venture-capital firm's largest-ever investments-Minerva says it will begin accepting applicants in 2015 for an entirely Web-based college program. The resulting undergraduate degree, it promises, will have all the prestige of anything the Ivy League can offer, but at half the cost."

""It will be harder to get into Minerva than any other university," says Nelson. "You'll have the same criteria for your grades, essay, and application. But you'll get no brownie points for how good an athlete you are, for how much money your parents can donate, or for what state you were born in.""

"There are a few other players such as Edx/Classto Go,  CanvasNet and other who have a different model and are worth looking at. But surely, if we are serious about a social commitment to education that leads to a real qualification that will help make an actual change to peoples lives we should be looking at the OER University model."

This one isn't labeled MOOC but analyzes the successes of it by a Stanford faculty