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"I'm beginning to think there's a fourth stage, one that I saw a few times at last week's "Multidisciplinary Research for Online Education" (MROE) workshop in Washington, DC. Apparently, when you get together a bunch of people in Stage 3, some of them move to Stage 4: Stage 4 - Maybe all those "dropouts" got just what they wanted out of the course."

I am considering a MOOC on Gamification that starts April 1.

These are important questions, and I'm glad I have colleagues helping me try to answer them. But my initial response to these concerns is to respond with a question of my own: Instead of comparing a Coursera course to a traditional college class, what if we compare it to a textbook? This is the question that often pivots discussions of Coursera from skepticism to curiosity.

"In February 2011 I started participating in something called the Daily Shoot, in which amateur photographers were encouraged to complete a photography assignment sent out via Twitter each morning. Photos uploaded to Flickr and tagged appropriately were aggregated on the Daily Shoot website, where I had a lot of fun seeing how others interpreted each day's assignment. I'm a much more creative photographer because of my participation in the Daily Shoot."

"Last fall, Vanderbilt computer science professor Doug Fisher "flipped" his graduate-level course on machine learning. Instead of having his students read their textbook before class or watch lecture videos that he created, as is typical for a "flipped" classroom, Doug asked his students to prepare for class by taking another professor's course, a massive open online course (MOOC) offered by Stanford computer science professor Andrew Ng on the Coursera platform. Doug's students watched Professor Ng's lecture videos and completed quizzes and other assignments within the MOOC, then came to class to discuss that material with Doug along with additional readings that went beyond the MOOC material. When Andrew Ng's course ended, Doug's students spent the remaining weeks of the semester engaged in projects that required them to apply what they had learned throughout the course."

"I am particularly excited by the plans we have for what we're calling "MOOC-supported learning communities," in which local groups of MOOC participants benefit from and contribute to the overall MOOC experience, as well as our plans to share the materials we develop for the MOOC (videos, assignments, other resources) in an open-source fashion."

"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."

"MOOCs are characterized by their openness, enabling anyone across the world with an Internet connection to participate.  As a result, most MOOCs have thousands, sometimes tens of thousands of participants. An online course with potentially tens of thousands of students is a very different teaching environment than face-to-face courses or even "traditional" online courses.  Teaching strategies practiced in other teaching contexts won't necessarily translate well to this context. Indeed, the sets of choices regarding learning objectives, content presentation, assessment, and instructor-to-student and student-to-student interaction are still being developed in this emergent teaching environment."

In college classrooms where innovations like smart phones and Facebook are getting in the way of learning, some tech-savvy professors are taking an "if you can't beat 'em join 'em" approach. They're asking students to bring their web-enabled mobile devices to class and keep them turned on.

"There are over 7 billion photos on Flickr, and, more importantly, many of them are (a) pretty good photos and (b) licensed under Creative Commons. The latter is important because in the United States when you take a photo, you get the copyright to that photo. That means if you want to use a photo you find online somewhere (perhaps using a Google image search), you need to contact the person who took that photo and get permission... unless that person has released the photo under Creative Commons, in which case you can use it without asking!"

"Although massive open online courses (MOOCs) are seen to be, and are in fact designed to be, stand-alone online courses, their introduction to the higher education landscape has expanded the space of possibilities for blended course designs (those that combine online and face-to-face learning experiences). Instead of replacing courses at higher education institutions, could MOOCs enhance those courses? This paper reports one such exploration, in which a Stanford University Machine Learning MOOC was integrated into a graduate course in machine learning at Vanderbilt University during the Fall 2012 semester. The blended course design, which leveraged a MOOC course and platform for lecturing, grading, and discussion, enabled the Vanderbilt instructor to lead an overload course in a topic much desired by students. The study shows that while students regarded some elements of the course positively, they had concerns about the coupling of online and in-class components of this particular blended course design. Analysis of student and instructor reflections on the course suggests dimensions for characterizing blended course designs that incorporate MOOCs, either in whole or in part. Given the reported challenges in this case study of integrating a MOOC in its entirety in an on-campus course, the paper advocates for more complex forms of blended learning in which course materials are drawn from multiple MOOCs, as well as from other online sources."