By Allie Bidwell. Online education providers don't always live up to their promises, critics say.
University faculty members from across the country continued an attack on massive open online courses with a video and group of letters sent to three leading online education providers, claiming the companies overpromise and underdeliver when it comes to the types of students they claim to serve. The Campaign for the Future of Higher Education last week sent letters to the leaders of Coursera, Udacity and edX saying the claims the companies made about online higher education are "overblown, misleading, or simply false." In an accompanying video released Tuesday, the coalition of faculty leaders questions whether online education providers are adequately serving student populations they have claimed to help in the past, such as those in rural communities and underdeveloped countries. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Are MOOCs Just Moneymaking Scams? Providers Challenged To Substantiate Grandiose Claims
Keith Button, Campus Technology.
So the Campaign for the Future of Higher Education has launched a video and campaign against MOOCs, depicting MOOCs as schemes designed to make money. This follows the release of three working papers  last year "questioning the basic positive assumptions about online education." I will admit, Coursera, Udacity and EdX make good targets. But it doesn't make sense to tar all MOOCs (and all online learning) with the same brush. More on this item at Inside Higher Ed, Huffington Post, L.A. Times. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Conventional Online Higher Education Will Absorb MOOCs, 2 Reports Say
Steve Kolowich, The Chronicle: Wired Campus Blog.
I think that the most interesting thing about this headline is that it asserts that there is such a thing as 'conventional online higher education'. Even a few years ago the words would have choked in the Chronicle headline writer's pen. So the two reports are from Center on Higher Education Reform at the American Enterprise Institute, which released the Bellwether report, and Teachers College at Columbia University, which released a report cited here the other day. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The MOOC Problem
Rolin Moe, Hybrid Pedagogy.
Interetsing article about the appropriation of terms like 'MOOC' and '2.0' to support marketing. The author concludes "MOOCs have been sold not only as an agent to democratize education, but also as a necessity because the real crisis is about employment and not learning." But also, this is worth noting: "in reality the MOOC as a learning system has underperformed traditional models and shows no large-scale cost benefit to education providers. More...