Mooc

Frances Bell has started a Google Doc collecting historical information about cMOOCs. I’m reposting my contributions to the doc (about my own cMOOCs) here on opencontent.org so I can find them again in the future if the Google Doc ever goes away. Year: 2007 Where: USU, INST 7150, Intro to Open Education Audience: Those interested in learning more about Open Education Archive.org Link Course Design: Students included both formal students earning credit at USU and students from around the world participating for free Students who completed the course and requested a Certificate of Completion received a certificate Course syllabus was presented in a wiki which students could (and did) edit Readings and videos were on the public web Each student maintained a blog where their writing and assignments were posted publicly A course OPML file was used to aggregate all student writing for easy reading in RSS Readers The course wiki included a master list of participants, including names, institution (if any), email address, and blog address Clusters of students created affinity-based sub-groups with mailing lists, etc. Year: 2009 Where: BYU, IPT 692R, Intro to Open Education Audience: Those interested in learning more about Open Education Archive.org Link ...

The following is a pre-print of an essay set to appear in Bonk et al.’s forthcoming book MOOCs and Open Education around the World_. It may undergo some additional editing before publication. Unlike the rest of the content on opencontent.org, this article is published under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike license v4.0, as per my contract with Routledge. This essay remixes some material that was previously published on opencontent.org._ In this piece I briefly explore the damage done to the idea of “open” by MOOCs, advocate for a return to a strengthened idea of “open,” and describe an open education infrastructure on which the future of educational innovation depends. ...

What’s the difference between OCWs and MOOCs? At the end of the day, it may be nothing more than managing expectations. Let’s take Physics for example. Here’s the MIT OCW Physics course from 1999. It includes videos, lecture notes and other readings, assignments and exams with solutions, and a recommendation that you buy a commercial textbook. There is a study group that learners can join. There does not appear to be any way to interact with the instructor. The course uses a very traditional pedagogy and is openly licensed. ...

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. ...

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. ...

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. ...

Stephen comments on the “Great Rebranding” of MOOCs: MOOCs were not designed to serve the missions of the elite colleges and universities. They were designed to undermine them, and make those missions obsolete…. There has been a great rebranding and co-option of the concept of the MOOC over the last couple of years. The near-instant response from the elites, almost unprecedented in my experience, is a recognition of the deeply subversive intent and design of the original MOOCs (which they would like very much to erase from history). ...