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"Google is teaming up with EdX, an open-source online education nonprofit started by Harvard and MIT, to create a new site that EdX's president compared to a "YouTube for MOOCs." The site is called mooc.org-MOOC being the unfortunate acronym for "massive open online courses." It will use the same EdX platform through which professors at Harvard, MIT, and other EdX-partner universities now offer their online courses. But it will be open to everyone, including businesses, governments, and private individuals as well as professors at non-EdX colleges."

Twenty-first-century learners have expectations that are not met within the current model of higher education. With the introduction of online learning, the anytime/anywhere mantra taken up by many postsecondary institutions was a first step to meeting learner needs for flexibility; however, the choice and determination of delivery mode still resides with the institution and course instructors. Recently, the massive open online course (MOOC) movement has been introduced as an undeniable force in higher education, and the authors argue that it is distracting leadership from focusing on alternative options for supporting the needs of learners who demand both personalization and real access to learning opportunities. The key element to the MOOC movement is its openness that enables student access to education. In this article, the authors present the multi-access learning framework that envelops the MOOC phenomenon and merges course access modes enabling student choice and agency. The authors report results from a pilot study on one type of multi-access course, where students were able to choose their mode of access. In this case, remote students accessed the course via webcam and joined their on-campus classmates and instructor who were together face-to-face. Implications for multi-access learning in relation to the MOOC movement are discussed.

The Blended Schools Network is hosting a massive open online course (MOOC). Starting on Monday, October 21, 2013 this course is designed for educators who wish to Learn the fundamentals of being a quality online teacher using a pre-built online course. Note: This course is designed for educators that have access to online course content via a course management system of their choosing (e.g. Blackboard, Canvas, Edmodo, Moodle etc.). If you do not have access to an online course the Blended Schools Network can provide you with a sample online course for use during the MOOC. This MOOC is an online course consisting of: Weekly online lesson content that can be completed at any time during the assigned week Weekly online collaboration activities that can be completed at any time during the assigned week Weekly online presentation and discussion sessions that can be attended live or viewed as a recording

This looked interesting - very interesting.....

"Most of the conversations were about the pitfalls of producing MOOCs. I wanted to talk more about how universities that may use other schools' MOOCs might consume them. Most of the people here are from disciplines outside of the humanities, so I tried to explain that what works in math or CS will not necessarily work for history, especially history survey classes. While everyone seemed interested in improving pedagogy, there was a kind of disturbing assumption underlying all my discussions that any class that doesn't use technology is somehow broken by definition."

Since 2012 many people have expressed the opinion that MOOCs will, or have the potential to, change higher education. However, before MOOCs begin transforming the manner in which higher education operates in the United States, there are at least a few current educational policies and practices that will hinder the advancement of MOOCs.

Once the MOOC "revolution" got underway, universities, usually slow-moving and tight-fisted institutions, couldn't run fast enough to put their own MOOCs online. And, right now, we're seeing the results. In January alone, 180 MOOCs from major international universities, will get underway. Below we've highlighted some of the courses that intrigued us most, but you can peruse the complete list here and make your own choices."

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have the potential to enable free university-level education on an enormous scale. A concern often raised about MOOCs is that although thousands enrol for courses, a very small proportion actually complete the course. The release of information about enrollment and completion rates from MOOCs appears to be ad hoc at the moment - that is, official statistics are not published for every course. This data visualisation draws together information about enrollment numbers and completion rates from across online news stories and blogs.

"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."

"However, there are some myths, which need to be uncovered and which are blurring the current picture of MOOC style learning:"

"A good example of the difference between instructional packaging and instructional scaffolding was provided recently by Debbie Morrison in her post A tale of two of MOOCs: divided by pedagogy.  In a very useful table (reproduced below) she compares the approaches taken by the (very popular, connectivist) e-Learning and Digital Cultures MOOC with the (aborted, instructivist) Fundamentals of Online Education MOOC. (The first is a great example of instructional scaffolding.)"

"Although not specifically designed to optimise learning, claims have been made that MOOCs are based on sound pedagogical foundations that are at the very least comparable with courses offered by universities in face-to-face mode. To validate this, we examined the literature for empirical evidence substantiating such claims. Although empirical evidence directly related to MOOCs was difficult to find, the evidence suggests that there is no reason to believe that MOOCs are any less effective a learning experience than their face-to-face counterparts. Indeed, in some aspects, they may actually improve learning outcomes."

"I often find it difficult to convince those in "real" colleges that they are in dialogue with for-profit higher education. After all, they're not "our kind of students". This juxtaposition of MOOCs and for-profits is the first time I think this has worked particularly well. As I said at the lecture, we get to MOOCs by way of the lessons venture capitalists have learned from for-profits' uneven success in penetrating the real currency of higher education: prestige. As the founder of 2tor has been rumored to have said, they can't build prestige so they'll just borrow it from existing institutions."

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.

"As any botanist knows, a monoculture is highly susceptible to a single pathogen. A great shakeout is under way, and MOOCs are the logical outgrowth of this push for interchangeable educational delivery. Curricula, faculty, and students are overwhelmingly indistinct, and MOOCs are simply the cheapest way to combine those elements in our economically constrained times."

An article providing an important perspective to consider when promoting or arguing for the MOOC concept.

"Regardless of the goal of MOOCs - be it for profit or idealism - there are genuine educational concerns that need to be closely monitored. A course with 10,000 (or even 1,000) students enrolled cannot foster any significant discussion. Yes, teaching assistants (TAs) can be employed to groups of 100-200 students for online questions etc, but that may not be so simple. About 100 TAs would be needed for a modest-sized MOOC of 10,000 students. Even for the lecturer to organise 100 TAs would be a Herculean task. Another serious concern is evaluation. How can one evaluate 20,000 students taking a course? Yes, electronic quizzes and multiple-choice tests can be given to monitor progress - if the material is suitable for such types of questions. But what about material in the social sciences and humanities that might be harder to evaluate (than science) without essay-style answers? I've already seen that companies are attempting to write computer programs that will grade essays. But as one educator put it, how can a programmer include wit and style for evaluation in such a program?"

"The relatively low completion rates of learners have been a central critique as MOOCs grow in popularity. This focus on completion rates, however, implies a monolithic view of disengagement that fails to acknowledge alternative forms of participation in MOOCs. Identifying subpopulations of learners based on their longitudinal engagement with the course allows MOOC designers to target interventions and develop adaptive course features. We develop a simple, scalable, and informative classification method that identifies four prototypical engagement trajectories: Completing learners, who complete the majority of the assessments offered in the class; Auditing learners, who do assessments infrequently (if at all) and engage instead by watching video lectures; Disengaging learners, who do assessments at the beginning of the course but then have a marked decrease in engagement, generally in the first third of the class; and Sampling learners, who enter and exit the course quickly, watching a minimal number of videos at some point during the course."

The recently announced partnership with the University of Edinburgh presented the team with an opportunity to engage and experiment with the much-publicised MOOC format, and foreground issues related to the theory and practice of online education itself. What follows are some of our perspectives on the planning and development of a large scale open course, what challenges the MOOC presents for delivering a worthwhile educational experience, and what questions this type of course format provokes for a team already teaching and researching in the field of e-learning and technology in higher education.

"But it turns out that -- when asked privately -- most presidents don't seem sure at all that MOOCs are going to transform student learning, or reduce costs to students -- two of the claims made by MOOC enthusiasts and an increasing number of politicians and pundits."

"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."

"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."