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Via Kim Flintoff
What's it about? In this subject you will explore Education as a social institution charged with communicating the knowledge, skills and cultural values that society considers most important.
DEAKIN University is offering assessment and credit for a fee as part of its first step into so-called massive open online courses launched yesterday. The free online course is open to anyone but doesn't offer any credit. However for $495, Deakin will assess a student's work and, subject to the student completing a separate research paper and passing an interview, they will be able to earn credit towards a Deakin postgraduate qualification in international and community development. Deakin has at this stage limited the fee and assessment option to a maximum of 100 students.
Massive open online course (MOOC) completion rates hover around 7 percent worldwide, and beyond stringing criticism from MOOC skeptics in higher education, there’s not much documentation for why so few students complete the classes. Open Culture, a website documenting the growth of MOOCs, recently published a list of the most common reasons for dropping out of MOOCs before the courses were finished, revealing a few telling tidbits about potential shortcomings for MOOC providers.
After becoming the first Australian university to join prestigious international online course provider Coursera, the University of Melbourne has been stunned by uptake of its suite of free subject offerings from people the world over.
The bottom line is that the simple idea of making and making use of relevant courses, made free (or cheap) and accessible to millions of young Africans, is as good an example as any of Africa leapfrogging a Western Higher Education system that has proved slow, cumbersome and far too expensive.
Via Nik Peachey
Leddy says this because he seems to be familiar with only one kind of MOOC - those of the MIT and Stanford model. Not all MOOCs are alike, yet despite the fact that he has had the traditional education that would allow him to read, think about, and intelligently respond to any field of study, that does not seem to extend to education itself. I am not sure what publications like the Boston Review or the Chronicle of Higher Ed is up to, but the majority of articles about MOOCs in such publications are typically written by those who have never taught online, taught a MOOC, or even taken a MOOC. They are written by people who have not even reviewed the history or literature (however scant) on MOOCs.
Conclusion When these people presented their visions for African MOOCs, it was disappointing to hear predictable responses about drop-outs, certification and quibbles about the history of MOOCs. This is to apply old narrow narratives to something entirely new and disruptive. This was in stark contrast to the visionaries, who were actually doing real work, on real MOOCs, with large numbers of real learners. We needn’t worry. The digital genie has escaped from the Ivory Tower and caught the imagination of people who really care about access. Thinking of MOOCs in Africa makes you see the potentials for escape from the dominant and oppressive western model of Higher Education; remote, inaccessible, expensive, elitist and overly-academic. I wish them well.
And I think everyone should. It certainly is on the edge of turning over education. Coursera is offering many more interesting courses than I could possibly take and the choice of which ones to sti...
MOOC. Another acronym to add to your collection. Stands for Massive Open Online Course. Translation: Free, online courses taught by experts in their fields, featuring professors from the nation’s most elite institutions of higher learning.
A BUSINESS model appears to be emerging for "massive open online courses" but it will not make the true work of universities redundant, says educator Shirley Alexander. Professor Alexander, deputy vice-chancellor for teaching and learning at the University of Technology, Sydney, cited a recent change whereby major MOOCs had begun to pursue collaborations that would allow MOOC units to be counted towards formal, on-campus qualifications. This could complement the role of the university, she told an Australian Learning and Teaching Fellows' forum at UTS yesterday. Employers placed greater weight on the interpersonal and communication skills of graduates, skills developed on campus, than on sheer academic results, which could equally be attained via a MOOC. "If what we're doing (at university) is such that it can be replaced by a MOOC, then we should give it up, and give back the taxpayers' dollars," Professor Alexander said. "What we should be providing on campus has to be qualitatively different to the kind of experience students can have on a MOOC".
From a stopgap measure for under-served college students to a massive enterprise forming new partnerships with research and public universities alike, the role of massive open online courses (MOOCs) in higher education has undergone a massive shift...
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As colleges begin using massive open online courses (MOOC) to reduce faculty costs, a Johns Hopkins University professor has announced plans for MOOA (massive open online administrations).
In a move aimed at buttressing its position as a leader in online education, Deakin University launched its first massive open online course (MOOC) on 17 June and plans to use it as a test-bed for redeveloping its full learning environment. Unlike the MOOC offerings from most universities, Deakin’s free online course will be a taster designed to promote fee-paying courses and will offer students a pathway to earning academic credit.
Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have certainly got higher education folks talking. These free online courses, often from prestigious universities, have prompted one obvious question: why should students pay to go to university when they can get quality courses for free?
In a move aimed at buttressing its position as a leader in online education, Deakin University will launch its first massive open online course (MOOC) on Monday.
In this post I review a recently completed Coursera course using a quality scorecard approach to measure and quantify five key dimensions of the course. I’m in the final week of a Coursera MOOC, Sp...
Via Bronwyn Disseldorp
I am one of the signers of the open letter by the professors of philosophy at San José State University to Professor Michael Sandel of Harvard University concerning his involvement in edX, a start-up company that offers massive open online courses (MOOCs). The letter, collaboratively written by members of the department and approved by all, explained our reasons for resisting the implementation of JusticeX, a course based on videotaped lectures from Sandel’s massively popular Harvard course on justice, in our curriculum. We wrote: There is no pedagogical problem in our department that JusticeX solves, nor do we have a shortage of faculty capable of teaching our equivalent course. We believe that long-term financial considerations motivate the call for massively open online courses (MOOCs) at public universities such as ours. Unfortunately, the move to MOOCs comes at great peril to our university. We regard such courses as a serious compromise of quality of education and, ironically for a social justice course, a case of social justice. Although our letter sparked much needed discussion about the value of MOOCs, confusion remains about the options presented by new education technologies and the potential value they may have for higher learning.
We shouldn't assume peer-to-peer (or P2P) interactions in MOOC forums are essentially the same or as good as on campus. A MOOC forum may have less interaction despite having a larger number of people and being more convenient.
Via MOOC News & Reviews, Andy Tattersall
As massive open online courses (MOOCs) gain publicity and popularity, it's time to address the legal concerns affecting this trend in higher education.
Recently published MOOC research on student behavior reveals interesting insights about the persistence of the certificate earners and about the time they put into the various course activities. “Learning in the Worldwide Classroom: Research Into edX’s First MOOC” was produced by a group of MIT and Harvard researchers, led by Lori Breslow, director of MIT’s Teaching and Learning Laboratory, and published in the summer 2013 issue of RPA Journal from Research & Practice in Assessment. The analysis looked at Circuits and Electronics (6.002x), taught in early 2012 by edX President Anant Agarwal to nearly 155,000 students, and they particularly focused on the 7,100 students who earned a certificate for passing the course
Preparing the course is labour intensive. It involves recording video lectures in a MOOC Studio as well as defining assignments and evaluations. The preparation time is of course smaller if you start from a well prepared course that you have been teaching for an extended time and for which you have pedagogical ressources readily available.
Via Peter Mellow
Massive open online courses are being promoted "for the students." But software execs and politicians pushing MOOCs have money and disruption at the top of the agenda.
iversity’s jury announced the 10 winners of its MOOC Production Fellowship contest. It will launch the courses for students in Germany, Europe and the rest of the world. Our view is that it is interesting – and a little surprising – that all the winners were from Europe. The list of finalists we looked at showed many good proposals from North America and other parts of the world, many with sexier ideas and titles than their European counterparts. So it makes us wonder if the contest was really ever a global one or just appeared to be so? Anyways, it’s great to have MOOC players emerging from Europe, including iversity. But perhaps they should have been more up front that it was an EU competition?
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