Udacity CEO Says MOOC 'Magic Formula' Emerging
By . After weathering a round of negative publicity, Udacity CEO Sebastian Thrun believes vindication is at hand.
"The thing I'm insanely proud of right now is I think we've found the magic formula," he said in an interview last week. "Had you asked me three months ago, I wouldn't have said that. I'm not at the point where everything is great. There are a lot of things to be improved, a lot of mistakes we're making, but I see it coming together."
Formerly a Stanford University professor as well as the founder of the Google X Labs, which created the famed self-driving car and the Google Glass wearable computer, Thrun co-founded Udacity in 2011 to explore the possibilities of massive open online courses (MOOCs). The success Thrun claims to be on the verge of is actually outside the realm of MOOCs, if you define MOOC as a free online course with a huge enrollment. Instead, he is claiming an early victory in Udacity's partnership with San Jose State University (SJSU) to offer $150 courses for which students would get credit for a passing grade, just as if they had attended on campus. The credit-bearing classes are much smaller, and in the latest round of classes the enrolled students got more tutoring and help. More...
Massive Open Online Courses and Beyond: the Revolution to Come
By Michael A Peters. The New York Times dubbed 2012 the year of the MOOCs - massive open online courses. Suddenly the discourse of MOOCs and the future of the university hit the headlines with influential reports using the language of "the revolution to come." Most of these reports hailed the changes and predicted a transformation of the delivery of teaching and higher education competition from private venture for-profit and not-for-profit partnerships. Rarely did the media focus on questions of pedagogy or academic labor. This article suggests that MOOCs should be seen within the framework of postindustrial education and cognitive capitalism where social media has become the dominant culture. More...
MOOCs Provider Directory
www.MOOCs.co is a directory of free Massively Open Online Courses providers (MOOCs).
MOOCs are free non-degree online courses with open unlimited global enrollment to anyone who desires to learn, and regardless of their current educational level.
About MOOCs:
Today, MOOCs provide access to many of the same courses being taught at some of the world's leading universities, and by leading scholars and industry experts in all areas: From Computer Science to Economics to Medicine to Literature to Engineering to Social Sciences and others.
To date in the K-12 segment, MOOCs largely concentrated in tutor-style courses to assist students in specific subjects: Math, English, Science, etc. However, it is anticipated that MOOCs similar in structure to those being offered in the higher education space will be soon be coming from some of the world's leading schools, their faculty and other professionals.
While most are non-credit bearing, some are starting to offer certificates, enhanced learning services and credit options at additional costs. However,none of these additional options are required to sign up and take advantage of these free courses.
In addition, some MOOCs students are starting to submit their MOOCs course work for credit recognition by their current colleges and universities.
The majority of MOOCs are in English, but increasingly - we are seeing some of these being translated by the MOOCs' online student community themselves. It is also anticipated that multi-lingual MOOCs will be growing with the increased participation of leading international universities.
Enrollment is done online at the MOOCs provider sites. More...
You know what would help MOOC articles? Getting the facts and goals right before analyzing
Keith Devlin has an article at Huffington Post today titled “MOOC Mania Meets the Sober Reality of Education”. The premise is that the halting of the San Jose State University (SJSU) / Udacity pilot project and of SB 520 show that naive assumptions on the power of MOOCs to disrupt higher education are insufficient in reality – education is too complex. While the overall article has some good points, the very foundation of the article is flawed.
I have written about both issues – SJSU program and SB 520 – and agree that there were flaws in both. Michael and I co-wrote a position paper for 20 Million Minds Foundation making recommendations to change and improve California legislation, and we have been critical of overly-simplistic views of higher education disruption. But authors should at least characterize the goals of each program accurately before drawing conclusions. The HuffingtonPost article has three glaring problems that undercut its entire message. More...
Qu'est-ce que la VAE ?
Qu'est-ce que la VAE ?
La validation des acquis de l’expérience (VAE) est une nouvelle voie pour obtenir tout ou partie d’un diplôme à finalité professionnelle, un titre ou une certification de qualification professionnelle figurant sur une liste validée par la Commission Nationale de la Certification Professionnelle, en s’appuyant sur l’expérience acquise au cours d’activités, professionnelles ou bénévoles, notamment.
Parcours VAE
Le parcours pour obtenir une certification par la VAE comporte différentes étapes. Vous trouverez ici la description de ces étapes, certaines sont facultatives et des conseils pour mener à bien votre démarche.
Financements de la VAE
La démarche de Validation des Acquis de l'Expérience a un coût, variable selon les ministères et les organismes valideurs. Selon le statut face à l’emploi du candidat (salarié, demandeur d’emploi, non salarié, bénévole…), il existe différents types de financement de la démarche de VAE.
