From the Chronicle of Higher Education, “What You Need to Know About MOOCs”, includes an interactive timeline that will be updated regularly.
http://chronicle.com/article/What-You-Need-to-Know-About/133475/
Overview
We are making numerous improvements to the portal which require us to take down the service. These changes include:
1). ITS will add back convenience links to the Welcome tab. These links include EMS, Calendars, Directory, Libraries, Moodle and Colgate’s Home Page. Feedback from the campus community informs us that the convenient links, found on the left-hand navigation of the old portal, were very helpful.
2). We are giving all employees access to the student employment tab.
Read more
Overview
ITS is upgrading the portal in order to simplify the design and functionality.
Impact
The portal could be down momentarily around 4:00pm.
Based on conversations with employees and students we have made every attempt to make the portal easier to use and more intuitive. Some changes to note in the new portal:
Time Frame:
The upgrade will take place at 4:00pm on Thursday, August 8, 2013.
Affected Users:
All users of Colgate’s portal. This includes faculty, staff, students and applicants.
Things you can do:
After we make the change, it can take up to 5 minutes for your browser to connect to the new portal. You should close and reopen your browser application to see the new portal.
Please contact the Helpline x7111 or helpline@colgate.edu if information you are unable to access anything in the portal.
In part 2 of this post found on the Los Angeles Book Review blog, the four academics who posted position essays on MOOCs respond to each other’s essays.
http://lareviewofbooks.org/essay/moocs-and-the-future-of-the-humanities-a-roundtable-part-2
A few highlights of the responses…
In part 1 of this post found on the Los Angeles Review of Books blog, four academics provide initial position papers on MOOCs.
http://lareviewofbooks.org/essay/moocs-and-the-future-of-the-humanities-a-roundtable-part-1
Al Filreis ’78 (professor at University of Pennsylvania) talks about his modern and contemporary American poetry (English 88) class that he has taught for 30 years. “The interactive, collaboration-based mode of the course has emerged from the material — “naturally,” as it were — and about 20 years ago I stopped lecturing entirely.” Filreis has been teaching this course online for about 20 years and has recently offered a MOOC.
Cathy N. Davidson (Duke University) discusses the educational access angle to MOOCs. “I don’t want a society that massively excludes so many students, nor one where you have to be better than perfect to gain admission to your state university.”
Ray Schroeder (University of Illinois Springfield) discusses his roots in a small liberal arts institution and his teaching online for the past decade. “The social constructivist principles of what scholars of education call the “community of inquiry” thrive online through teaching presence, social presence, and cognitive presence. Those are the very same principles that led to success the liberal arts college experience decades ago.”
Ian Bogost (Georgia Institute of Technology) talks about the different non-educational motivations for offering MOOCs (maybe good, maybe not so good). “Even if MOOCs do sometimes function as courses (or as textbooks), a minority of their effects arises from their status as educational experiences. Other, less obvious aspects of MOOCs exert far more influence on contemporary life.”
