Group items tagged

"While I am not a huge fan of MOOCs (See, "MOOCs - The Opium of the Masses," I think that there is one area in which they might actually be extremely useful - ongoing teacher professional development (PD). They are a good fit to help meet a very specific need, which they could do quite well given teachers' experience with education."

Seb Schmoller with short piece on moocs and why they are worth attention.

"Real teaching is not about passing on the 'the material', as if knowledge were some sort of mass-produced commodity that ships from Amazon. Real teaching is about conveying a way of thinking. How can a teacher convey a way of thinking when he doesn't genuinely think that way?"

"It was just 18 months ago that we were living in the "Year of the MOOC." Massive open online courses-MOOC for short-were supposed to revolutionize the way people learned and deliver high-quality education to the masses. But the idea faced a tough 2013. The co-founder of Udacity, an early pioneer in free online education, admitted that his company initially had a "lousy product," while studies showed that hardly any students were actually completing the courses offered by such services at all."

"The question I'd ask: is the money that mass-marketing colleges are spending on marketing themselves and scaling themselves well spent? Are they organizing for changing lives or for ranking high? Does NYU have to get so much bigger? Why?"

Slides on Spider and Toucans projects looking at iTunesU and OERu

How to mass download Google docs using Greasemonkey scripts