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After only three months for planning and development, Duke University and Dr. Roger Barr successfully delivered a challenging open online course via Coursera to thousands of students around the world. Lessons learned from this experience have contributed to the strategic goals of Duke's Online Initiatives.

This semester (spring, 2013), I integrated my on-campus Duke University class (which I've taught twice before using a "traditional" lecture format) with my online class (which I'd taught once before via Coursera MOOC), both bearing the title "Introduction to Genetics and Evolution." My on-campus class had 453 students, while the online one peaked at 27,000 enrolled (though MOOC enrollment figures are misleading). Needless to say, I was more than slightly nervous about this experiment messing up, given the number of students who would be affected! My initial reaction is that the integration (via "flipped classroom") was a success and thoroughly enjoyable by me (I'll have to wait to see the formal course evaluations before I know how much most of the students liked it), but I learned some lessons for future iterations.

"The university's Arts & Sciences Council, the governing arm of the undergraduate faculty, voted down a proposal to join a consortium of top colleges offering for-credit online courses through 2U, a company that specializes in real-time, small-format online education."

"During the webinar, one of the participants shared a link for a report from Duke University on their first MOOC, Bioelectricity: A Quantitative Approach, delivered through Coursera in fall 2012. And what a find that was - this is the most thorough description I have yet seen from a university about their experience selecting, development, delivering and analyzing a MOOC. Kudos to Yvonne Belanger and Jessica Thornton, the authors."

"The big shift: far fewer in-class lectures. Students will watch the lectures on Coursera beginning Monday. "Class will become a time for activities and also teamwork," said Sinnott-Armstrong. He's devised exercises to help on-campus students engage with the concepts in the class, including a college bowl-like competition, a murder mystery night and a scavenger hunt, all to help students develop a deeper understanding of the material presented in the lectures."

Before using information found on a web page for your research project, consider the following criteria to evaluate its credibility.

"This post briefly introduces instructional video accessibility and some tools to make videos more accessible."

Bound by Law... great exploration (in comic book form!) of fair use and copyright for film makers!

There's nothing particularly new about MOOCs. Most universities have offered online courses for many years and the basic technologies involved - video lectures, discussion forums, tests, and the like - are the same we have used with on-campus and distance students. The only difference is the scale.

"…because of term extensions, we've had to wait almost a century before copyrighted works enter the public domain (in 2019, works from 1923 are finally freely available). Under current copyright terms - life plus 70 years for natural authors, and 95 years from publication for works of corporate authorship - you're unlikely to see any works created in your lifetime enter the public domain. This imposes great (and in many cases unnecessary) costs on creativity, on libraries and archives, on education and on scholarship. More broadly, it imposes costs on our collective culture. Even for the works that are still commercially available, the shrinking public domain increases costs to citizens and limits creative reuse. But at least those works are available. Unfortunately, much of our cultural heritage, perhaps the majority of the culture of the last 80 years, consists of the orphan works described above-works that have no identifiable or locatable copyright holder. Though no one is benefiting from the copyright, they are nevertheless presumptively off limits."