By Guy M. Rogers. Alexander the MOOC is up - and flying. Lift-off took place on the morning of Tuesday February 4th. By then more than 17,000 had registered to take History 229X “Was Alexander Great?” Our numbers have actually grown over the past month and we now have about 17,500 people from over 130 countries, ages 12 to 86, taking our EdX/WellesleyX course. Read more...

The first research into the learning and teaching of MOOCs is published today by the HEA, and finds that ‘the teacher persists’.
The Pedagogy of the MOOC: the UK View by Sian Bayne and Jen Ross from the University of Edinburgh, which also contains snapshots of five current UK MOOCs with an emphasis on the detail of teacher practice, concludes that although teaching functions are sometimes delegated to automated processes and community-based social learning in MOOCs, the place and visibility of the teacher remain of central importance. More...

By Glyn Moody. One of the central themes of this blog is how the idea of sharing and openness that lie at the heart of open source have spread fruitfully to other domains - open data, open knowledge, open access are obvious examples. So it was perhaps inevitable that at some point I would write about the currently-fashionable MOOCs:
A Massive Open Online Course (MOOC; English pronunciation: /muːk/) is an online course aimed at unlimited participation and open access via the web. In addition to traditional course materials such as videos, readings, and problem sets, MOOCs provide interactive user fora that help build a community for students, professors, and teaching assistants (TAs). MOOCs are a recent development in distance education.

By Gregory Karp. Reap the rewards of a class at a famous university — for free on the Internet.
Free entertainment online is nothing new, but what if you could access a form of entertainment and enrichment over the Internet that others pay thousands of dollars for and that keeps you occupied for weeks at a time?
That's one of the allures of MOOCs — massive open online classes. They're college classes taught online, some by the world's leading experts in their fields at famous universities. More...

American universities have gone full circle. Many of them have been proposing free online courses (MOOCs) for everybody to enjoy. But they use it to recruit real, fee-paying students. This week, the University of Pennsylvania delivers a course teaching how to apply to U.S. universities. When you consider such a move, think about all that it entails. The quality of the teachers is only half the equation! More...

By Kate Rogers. Netflix proved with the success of its online original series “House of Cards” that Americans—specifically Milennials—love to binge watch, and one company is taking note of the consumption habit and putting it to use to train the latest members of the labor market.
Aquent, a global staffing firm, recently implemented a MOOC (massive open online course) program called the Aquent Gymnasium to help fill the skills gap in the design and marketing industry. The classes are online and on-demand, and specifically target Millennial workers because they can choose to either “binge learn” or take a class once a week. More...

By Dan Ariely. As winter creeps into spring, it’s getting to be midterm exam season across America’s college and university campuses. That means the risk for college students of losing a grandmother will soon spike by 10 percent. A few months down the road, before finals, the risk will climb 19 percent.
Duke behavioral economist and psychologist Dan Ariely has a preventive prescription: enroll in a MOOC — one of those Massive Open Online Courses, and you might just save your grandmother some fatal stress about your exam performance. Huh?
Stay tuned — Ariely’s good at explaining irrationality. He taught his first MOOC — “An Introduction to Irrational Behavior” — last year, and as it was just getting started, reported on the pluses and pitfalls of teaching online for Making Sense. When the course was over, he told us he was surprised how time-consuming teaching a MOOC was. He wasn’t sure if he’d do another one. More...

"Comment financer son projet solidaire", tel est l’intitulé du nouveau MOOC proposé par Les Trophées Solidaires et OpenClassrooms, à compter du 14 avril prochain.
Un nouveau double-diplôme est en cours de préparation du côté de Après un MOOC relatif au financement de son entreprise, OpenClassrooms change de thématique avec un tout nouveau cours en ligne massif et gratuit qui sera lancé le 14 avril prochain sur sa plateforme. Le MOOC "Comment financer son projet solidaire", conçu avec Les Trophées Solidaires, est destiné aux étudiants et à tous ceux qui souhaitent réaliser des projets à vocation humanitaire, solidaire ou de développement durable. Suite...

Massive online open courses, known as Moocs, are in "danger" of creating divisions in society, Cambridge University professor Mary Beard has said.
Speaking to the Today programme, Prof Beard said the courses risk setting apart the "privileged few", who get to meet and converse with their professors face-to-face, from the "unprivileged mass" who only get taught only via a screen. More...