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/
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.”
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Published: March 5, 2013
Bottom line: There is still huge value in the residential college experience and the teacher-student and student-student interactions it facilitates. But to thrive, universities will have to nurture even more of those unique experiences while blending in technology to improve education outcomes in measurable ways at lower costs. We still need more research on what works, but standing still is not an option.
Napster, Udacity, and the Academy
a blog post by Clay Shirky in November 2012
Shirky studies the effects of the internet on society and holds a joint appointment at NYU, as an Associate Arts Professor at the Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) and as an Associate Professor in the Journalism Department. He is also a Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, and was the Edward R. Murrow Visiting Lecturer at Harvard’s Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy in 2010.
Link to the full post: http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2012/11/napster-udacity-and-the-academy/
A few highlights…
LAPTOP U
Has the future of college moved online?
MAY 20, 2013 BY NATHAN HELLER
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/05/20/130520fa_fact_heller?currentPage=all&mobify=0
This article poses different viewpoints on MOOCs. The one passage that resonated with me was on page 14 where Peter Burgard (Harvard professor of German) discusses how MOOCs will cause the slow demise of higher education. Here is the quote:
“Imagine you’re at South Dakota State,” he said, “and they’re cash strapped, and they say, ‘Oh! There are these HarvardX courses. We’ll hire an adjunct for three thousand dollars a semester, and we’ll have the students watch this TV show.’ Their faculty is going to dwindle very quickly. Eventually, that dwindling is going to make it to larger and less povertystricken universities and colleges. The fewer positions are out there, the fewer Ph.D.s get hired. The fewer Ph.D.s that get hired—well, you can see where it goes. It will probably hurt less prestigious graduate schools first, but eventually it will make it to the top graduate schools. . . .If you have a smaller graduate program, you can be assured the deans will say, ‘First of all, half of our undergraduates are taking MOOCs. Second, you don’t have as many graduate students. You don’t need as many professors in your department of English, or your department of history, or your department of anthropology, or whatever.’ And every time the faculty shrinks, of course, there are fewer fields and subfields taught. And, when fewer fields and subfields are taught, bodies of knowledge are neglected and die. You can see how everything devolves from there.”
Massive Open Online Courses, aka MOOCs, Transform Higher Education and Science
March 13, 2013
There is reason to hope that this is a positive development, says Roy Pea, who heads a Stanford center that studies how people use technology. MOOCs, which have incorporated decades of research on how students learn best, could free faculty members from the drudgery of repetitive introductory lectures. What’s more, they can record online students’ every mouse click, an ability that promises to transform education research by generating data that could improve teaching in the future. “We can have microanalytics on every paper, every test, right down to what media each student prefers,” says Pea.
