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We grabbed five minutes with Steven Schwartz, VC at Macquarie University, to talk about the online course revolution and how the UK and Australia compare on social mobility

another example of free online courses

Nice review with 2 interesting concepts: - distinguish between 'content' and 'process in Open Ed - distinguish between 'push' and 'pull' models Push models (e.g. MOOCs) provide open access to a structured course experience. Pull models enable academics to choose the OERs they want to use for their context. Summary: "In summary, OERs as they are currently being promoted (the current ''push' model), will be a passing fad with respect to mainstream university and college education, because the core assumptions on which initiatives such as edX are based are false. However, OERs in terms of resources freely available over the web will be a game-changer, but in a 'pull' rather than a 'push' model. The one exception to this will be in the area of continuing education for the masses, where there will be continuing demand for structured, prepackaged courses built around the edX model. In other words, we need a little more humility about the potential role of OERs. There are niche markets such as continuing education that can still be very large that can be served by initiatives such as edX and MOOCs. But the real value of OERs will be to shift instructors away from the creation and delivery of content to focusing on how best learning can be developed and facilitated for, in and by our students. This way we will avoid developing automatons and instead will be developing people who can think for themselves."

Interesting article. The key concept I took away was multiple perspectives where "Citizens could watch multiple versions of the same basic courses taught by different professors across the country and see a variety of ways of approaching the same questions".. but I wonder (especially for 1st yr students) if students would listen to multiple lectures on the same topic?