Group items tagged

Most Likely: More Startups, More Schools Offer MOOCs

edX has a track record, albeit brief, of partnership and open access. Perfect for a smaller school without a big technology budget. Look for online schools to perhaps form a similar partnership so they can offer MOOCs. The online schools version would likely be powered by a third-party like Udacity or Coursera. Meanwhile, large tech companies and startups alike work to carve out their own niche in the MOOCs landscape. There’s a lot of money to be had in the transition of education so don’t be surprised if this happens no matter what the future holds for MOOCs.

But I believe learning – whether in online social networks or straight from the canon, bound in leather – involves being able to read and make sense of the codes and signals being given off by those you interact with, particularly those you expect to learn from. These are what I refer to when I talk about “legitimacy structures” within academia and networks in the final slide of the presentation above. They are, in a sense, literacies. They’re what I’m stumbling towards when I talk about the networked or digital literacies that MOOCs – if they connect people – help develop.

that the filters and structure aren’t the whole challenge: how to translate and signal what I’m learning to two different audiences is also a process I’m going to have to address overtly. Because there are power structures that support and prop up societal views of knowledge that make networked knowledge and practices appear invisible or illegitimate.

The lack of face-to-face is not a void, only a lack of literacy

Research presented here by researchers from Wabash College -- and based on national data sets -- finds that there may be a minimal relationship between what colleges spend on education and the quality of the education students receive. Further, the research suggests that colleges that spend a fraction of what others do, and operate with much higher student-faculty ratios and greater use of part-time faculty members, may be succeeding educationally as well as their better-financed (and more prestigious) counterparts

45 colleges and universities, most of them liberal arts colleges,

good teaching with high quality interactions with faculty," high expectations and academic challenge, interaction with ideas and people different from one's own, and "deep learning" through characteristics identified by the National Survey of Student Engagement.