How To Take On the MOOCs—And the Rest of Higher Ed Too

By Cathy Davidson. Yesterday registration closed for my ISIS 640 class, “History and Future of (Mostly) Higher Education.”  13 students all had to apply to be accepted: undergrads, grads, PhD and MFA students, a computer scientist, an artist or two, humanists, information designers, and assessment experts, from Duke, UNC, and NC State. 5 were already in the graduate class that wrote, edited, and published Field Notes for 21^st Century Literacies:  A Guide to New Theories, Methods, and Practices for Open Peer Teaching and Learning, which is one of the key texts for the new course, the MOOC, and the #FutureEd movement.  They are the core team with whom I’ll be strategizing our contribution to what we hope will be a world-wide movement to, first, change the scope and the voices in the conversation about higher education--and then, second, to actually begin to change higher education.  We call this #FutureEd. More...