I am, ostensibly, on vacation. But if I don’t get this thought out of my brain it will continue to torment my cross-country driving. What exactly is most unique / special about MOOCs? Let’s unpack the acronym back to front: - Courses. Well, we’ve had these for a few hundred years. At least. Many of these are not MOOCs. - Online courses. Well, we’ve had these for decades. At least. Many of these are not MOOCs. ...

The Deseret News, a local Utah newspaper, today published a story titled Study: Majority of U.S. charter schools perform equal or worse than traditional schools, accompanied by the following infographic: What’s wrong with this story? While the information conveyed by the headline is, strictly speaking, an accurate reflection of the data, the DesNews is using the headline to seriously mislead the public. Let’s explore an alternate, accurate headline the DesNews could have run to see how they’re misinforming the public with this story. ...

EdWeek has a nice writeup of the recent conference organized by the Association of Educational Publishers and the Association of American Publishers’ school division. The article, Ed Publishers Adjust to Changing Market, New Resources, includes this interesting bit about publishers’ current thinking about OER: Publishers are also trying to gauge how the rise of free K-12 educational materials, often called “open- education resources,” will affect their businesses. Many education publishers today are assuming that school districts and other buyers of curriculum and other products will recognize the value of products that publishers have poured money into developing, and will be willing to pay more for products the industry believes is of higher quality. It’s a shaky assumption, Goff said. ...

One of the many benefits of my Shuttleworth Fellowship is getting to hang out with other Shuttleworth Fellows twice a year at a meeting called The Gathering. They are an insanely bright, motivated, talented group of people. Take, for example, Marcin Jakubowski who is building the Global Village Construction Set (GVCS), “an open technological platform that allows for the easy fabrication of the 50 different Industrial Machines that it takes to build a small civilization with modern comforts.” I’m still a little in awe of the scope of work he has taken on… ...

I’m grateful for your responses to my recent post Be Awesome Instead. In reading your comments, tweets, and other blog posts responding to the post, I was a bit concerned that some readers may have gotten the impression that I was saying it was ok to “Be Awesome Instead” of being open. That was absolutely not the point I was making. Being open - truly open - is absolutely critical for reasons I will describe below. The point I was trying to make in my post is that we should be awesome instead of being whiny; we should be contributors rather than naysayers. ...

I’ve been fairly quiet recently about Lumen Learning, the “RedHat for OER” I founded earlier this year with Kim Thanos. Lumen (for short) is where I’m spending my Shuttleworth Fellowship time, with the goal of drastically increasing the use of OER in formal educational settings in order to lower the cost and improve the quality of education. Today Lumen released its first six Open Course Frameworks. Open Course Frameworks are an idea I am very excited about, because they greatly simplify the process of adopting OER for the average teacher or institution. Open Course Frameworks are: ...

Cole Camplese, for whom I have great respect, recently wrote a wonderful essay about the negative response to MOOCs from many voices in the open ed space: Just a couple of years ago we were all trying so hard to get people to accept the idea that open access to learning was a great thing. Hell, some of the best conversations I’ve ever had in this field have centered around the ideals of openness, but now that the MOOC thing has happened the same people who built rallying calls for more open access to learning are now rejecting this movement. Why? Because it is driven by corporations trying to make money? Because it isn’t really open? Because the press isn’t giving a few people the credit they believe they deserve? ...

Jim Groom briefly but insightfully runs the numbers on the Georgia Tech / Udacity deal: Apart from all sorts of misgivings about Georgia Tech’s MOOCish Master’s program in Computer Science, I want to take a moment to do the math. You charge $7000 a year tuition with the idea you’ll have a 2-year cohort of 10,000 students. If you add that up, you get $140 million. That’s massive, especially when you’re only hiring eight new faculty to educate those 10,000 students. Follow the money, this is no joke, the profits are huge even after you split 40% of the kitty with Udacity. ...

If you haven’t read Audrey Watters’ coverage of the Coursera / Chegg deal, I highly recommend it. The short version is, DRM’ed commercial content is making its way into MOOCs, and this stands to make all involved - including the professors - quite wealthy. While I completely and fully support recent calls to “reclaim open”, I think the term MOOC is irretrievably out of the barn. Consequently, perhaps the only way left to put an end to the openwashing of the big for-profit MOOC providers is to redefine the term MOOC in the popular mind. I propose that, whenever you hear the acronym MOOC, you think: ...

The Chronicle have published an extremely articulate and well thought-through letter written by professors in the philosophy department at San Jose State University in response to their being encouraged to “adopt” an edX course on Justice. I’ve embedded the letter below, which I strongly encourage you to read in full. The one section of the letter that absolutely breaks my heart is the top of page 4: Good quality online courses and blended courses (to which we have no objections) do not save money, but purchased-pre-packaged ones do, and a lot. With prepackaged MOOCs and blended courses, faculty are ultimately not needed. ...