Coursera Starting Chinese-language MOOCs

By Robert McGuire. Let’s start with my vote for the most overlooked news of the week (and a great example of burying the lede.) According to the last third of a story in Xinhua Insight, Coursera will launch a Chinese-language platform in August using the National Taiwan University’s history classes and a Chinese opera course from the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Similar Chinese-language partnerships are in the works, according to Coursera co-founder Andrew Ng, who was in Beijing two weeks ago to promote the company. Also largely overlooked — brought to our attention by Ray Schroeder’s Online Learning Update — is news of a course at the University of Indiana limited to 500 students and therefore just a BOOC. (The B is for Big.) The goal of this model is to foster more dialogue than is typical in a MOOC, dividing students into professional networking groups and relying on “wikifolios” that facilitate sharing and commenting on written drafts. Read more...