MOOC's (Massively Open Online Courses)

First of a series of blogposts about experiences in setting up a MOOC. Especially the question "can you use a MOOC to teach people more effectively?" will be central in this series.

Tx to Theo Bakker for link

"In my mind, this is another key milestone in the rapid transformation of MOOCs into the next generation – in combination with Instructure’s launch of the Canvas Network, Udacity’s move to MOOC 2.0, and the American Council on Education’s moves to recommend credits for MOOCs."  

Tx to Marco Derksen for Link tip

Harvard Business Review summary of the MOOC panel discussion at Davos. 

Two most remarkable quotes:

Former Harvard President Larry Summer: "The first stage is when it does what was being done before but better. That's what is happening now. But we're going to where we don't need to have two semesters, classes of same length, grading on the basis of things called exams."

Bill Gates:

"from a global perspective, all these high numbers of students we're hearing about today, the effective number of people who use them is zero. It's not widely used as a percentage of the global population. Our whole notion of 'credential', which means you went somewhere for a number of hours, needs to move to where you can prove you have the knowledge and the quality of these online courses need to improve. Over the next few years the quality will improve. 90% of these courses will be long forgotten and never viewed. Over the next five years this transformation will be phenomenal but only through a pretty brutal winnowing out process."