MOOCs are so unambitious: introducing the MOOPhD

By Jon Dron. During my recent visit to Curtin University, Torsten Reiners, Lincoln Wood and I started brainstorming what we think might be an interesting idea. In brief, it is to build and design what should eventually become a massive, open, online PhD program. Well, nearly. This is a work in progress, but we thought it might be worth sharing the idea to help spark other ideas, get feedback and maybe gather a few people around us who might be interested in it.
The starting point for this was thinking about ways of arranging crowd funding for PhD students, which evolved into thinking about other crowd-based/funded research support tools and systems to support that. For example, we looked at possible ways to not only crowd-fund research projects but to provide structures and tools to assist the process: forming and setting up project teams, connecting with others, providing project management support, proposal writing assistance, presenting and sharing results, helping with the process of writing reports and papers for publication, and so on. Before long, what we were designing began to look a little like a research program. And hence, the MOOPhD (or MOOD - massive open online doctorate). Read more...