#mooc's

[interpersonalrelations-blog]

Is this what higher education will be like in 2025? If so, school will no longer be interpersonal what so ever! 

The New York Times. (2013, January 8). Welcome to the brave new world of Mooc’s. (Massive open online courses). [Video file] Retrieved from via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KqQNvmQH_YM 

[olyvine]

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[dionysius]

Cool, more MOOC's

[majoringindebt]

In the medieval period, the university was a citadel, walled off and separate. We are post-citadel. It is wires, not spires, that define a university now.

Jeremy Adelman, Princeton professor after teaching his first history MOOC

[majoringindebt]

“MOOCs today are our equivalents of early TV, when TV personalities looked and sounded like radio announcers (or often were radio announcers). People are thinking the same way about MOOCs, as replacements of traditional lectures or tutorials, but in online rather than physical settings. In the meantime, a whole slew of forces is driving a much larger transformation, breaking learning (and education overall) out of traditional institutional environments and embedding it in everyday settings and interactions, distributed across a wide set of platforms and tools. They include a rapidly growing and open content commons (Wikipedia is just one example), on-demand expertise and help (from Mac Forums to Fluther, Instructables, and WikiHow), mobile devices and geo-coded information that takes information into the physical world around us and makes it available any place any time, new work and social spaces that are, in fact, evolving as important learning spaces (TechShop, Meetups, hackathons, community labs).”

[majoringindebt]

Even though I'm sold on the potential of MOOC's to fundamentally transform higher education in the next 5 years this is a hilarious fiasco. "In the you-can’t-make-up-this-stuff category, here’s an amusing piece about the failure of a MOOC (massive open online course) that was designed to teach more than 40,000 students the fundamentals of how to create an online course. It was written by Jill Barshay, a contributing editor to The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, non-partisan education-news outlet affiliated with the Hechinger Institute on Education and the Media, an independently funded unit of Teachers College, Columbia University. She has been a radio and print reporter for two decades.This appeared on The Hechinger Report’s Digital blog."

[majoringindebt]

Hopefully this is the first step in the flood gates opening for free open online courses getting accepted for credit by colleges as this will definitely reduce the amount of debt students go into to get their degree.

Any hypothesis about how MOOCs might "disrupt" the American higher-education system inevitably will turn on the willingness of colleges to grant credit for courses for which students do not pay tuition. And when it comes to inviting free online courses into the world of mainstream credentialing, institutions might prefer to act conservatively for fear of undermining their own bases of revenue.

Andrew Ng, a co-founder of Coursera, said some of the company's university partners have been wary even of submitting their own MOOCs for consideration by the council's credit-recommendation service. "For students to receive credit, even if that credit is sponsored by a different institution—that's a big step," said Mr. Ng. "I think it's still so new that a lot of us are getting used to the implications and what this means."

[majoringindebt]

All of this could well add up to the future of higher education — if anyone can figure out how to make money.

Coursera has grown at warp speed to emerge as the current leader of the pack, striving to support its business by creating revenue streams through licensing, certification fees and recruitment data provided to employers, among other efforts. But there is no guarantee that it will keep its position in the exploding education technology marketplace.

For their part, Ms. Koller and Mr. Ng proclaim a desire to keep courses freely available to poor students worldwide. Education, they have said repeatedly, should be a right, not a privilege. And even their venture backers say profits can wait.