Group items tagged

"San Jose State University on Tuesday announced a deal with Udacity, a major MOOC player, to create a pilot program of three online, entry-level courses that will cost students $150 to take and lead to university-awarded academic credits if passed. San Jose State professors will teach the courses while Udacity contributes the platform and staff support, including mentors who will help track and encourage students' progress."

"I'm not opposed to disruption; rather, I'm skeptical about the kind of disruption start-ups and tech folks promise: "paradigm-shifting" technology that improves university teaching and learning. The truth is, many of these start-ups clearly have no idea what actually works in higher ed and know little about the direction university teaching and learning have moved in the last 10 years, because they're trying to take us backward, not forward. Start-up and commercial tech are certainly proving disruptive-just in all the wrong ways."

"The widespread abandonment of the title "college" in favor of "university" demonstrates the preference to be perceived as "universal" and research-oriented rather than as a "collegium" drawn to a unique scholastic endeavor rooted in place and history. Higher education is becoming increasingly monocultural as demands for geographic (and market) expansiveness take precedence." - I think this is something Wooster can try to use to its advantage. Maybe we embrace being a collegium.

"Fifteen years from now more than half of the universities will be in bankruptcy, including the state schools. In the end, I am excited to see that happen." Clayton Christensen makes some interesting observations, but I'm just not sure about the timeframe he puts on the death of universities.

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

Will MOOCs open elite universities to excessive corporate influence? (essay)

Essay on a contradiction facing MOOCs and their university sponsors

Khan's ideas for what a 21st century university could look like sounds a lot like how I have heard early centers of learning described.

"On May 19, 1962, the New York Times, in a feature article, congratulated a housewife and mother of two for completing a Bachelor of Science of Arts degree from New York University.  That might not seem significant, but Mrs. Cora Gay Carr earned 54 of the 128 credits required for her degree not in an NYU classroom, but by watching television."

"America is shifting from a national, analog, industrial economy to a global, digital, information economy. Our social institutions, colleges and universities included, were created for the former. Today they all seem to be broken. They work less well than they once did. Through either repair or replacement - more likely a combination - they need to be refitted for a new age. Higher education underwent this kind of evolution in the past as the United States shifted from an agricultural to an industrial economy. The classical agrarian college, imported from 17th-century England with a curriculum rooted in the Middle Ages, was established to educate a learned clergy to govern the colonies. This model held sway until the early 19th century."

Can you stitch together a collection of MOOCs into a degree? University of Wisconsin says you can.