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Professors' thoughts on MOOCs

"Amid the various influences that massive open online courses have had on higher education in their short life so far -- the topic of a daylong conference here Monday -- this may be among the more unexpected: The courses may be prompting some faculty to pay more attention to their teaching styles than they ever have before." - this was something that administrators from Stanford mentioned in the Educause Learning Initiatives conference when discussing the biggest benefits they had seen from developing MOOCs

The article discusses the online learning website Coursera, which was founded by Stanford University professors Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller in an attempt to provide free online courses. The services are offered to and taken by students from around world, and Ng and Koller believe that their method is changing traditional standards for lecturing by forcing students to be interactive and engaged during the lecture. Topics include how Coursera will ultimately earn revenue, the economic benefit of online education for top-level universities, and a list of other free online education programs, including EDX, the Minerva Project, and Udacity

xEducation is a book that George Siemens, Bonnie Stewart, and Dave Cormier have agreed (and been contracted) to write for Johns Hopkins University Press. We expect the book will be published in mid-2013. Our focus is on sidestepping the rather substantial hype around educational reform, particularly from the technological angle, and present a solid discussion of the scope and nature of higher education (HE) change.

Kind of what we began to discuss at the Oct. meeting. Use the MOOC to flip the class. Our faculty spend their time with students going deeper into the subject and let the MOOC handle the content.