By Angela Hey. Mountain View's Coursera offers free online courses from the world's leading universities. Today, at the Global Mobile Internet Conference in San Francisco's Moscone Center, Stanford professor Andrew Ng described why he co-founded Coursera, which launched in 2012. The conference, which is also held in Beijing, features mobile apps, wearable devices and connected cars. More...

By David Blake. This rise of the MOOC has spurred a reexamination of many entrenched higher education practices, such as the typical college course and how it's taught. MOOCs and other forms of nontraditional learning may have an even larger effect on the nature of diplomas and transcripts. People's perceptions about what education is and what kinds of learning experiences matter are changing. The idea that learning occurs in many different environments -- and that out-of-classroom experiences are just as valuable as in-classroom ones -- is becoming more widely accepted. The question now is how to collect these diverse experiences into a meaningful representation of that newly acquired knowledge. More...

Après un MOOC sur le développement durable, d'autres sur le management, l'histoire du droit et des institutions, place aux mathématiques sur France Université Numérique ! La plateforme annonce en effet, dans une vidéo, le lancement de deux MOOC, initiés et préparés par le célèbre mathématicien Cédric Villani.
Alors que la plateforme France Université Numérique (FUN) se met lentement mais sûrement en place, le site vient d'annoncer, par le biais d'une vidéo, le lancement prochain de deux MOOC en mathématiques : l'un pour les collégiens et lycéens, l'autre pour les étudiants en première et deuxième année de licence. Suite...

Great blog post that really captures the most important criticism of MOOCs (thanks to Karen Head for forwarding it).  We had Armando Fox of Berkeley’s “MOOC” Center visit (video of his GVU Brown Bag talk), and he said explicitly in his talk, “MOOCs are not about democratization of education.  They’re really about the rich getting richer.”  I blogged on these themes this month for Blogs@CACM: Results from the first-year course MOOCs: Not there yet. More...

Elsevier is to expand its support for Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) offered by US provider edX.
The STM publisher has previously piloted textbook content in one edX MOOC, a Circuits and Electronics course taught by Anant Agarwal, who is both edX president and an Elsevier author. Now that is to be expanded to up to five courses, each of which will use an Elsevier text chosen from the publisher's catalogue in computing, engineering, maths, science and criminal justice. More...

Si vous voulez vous faire une idée de la révolution qui se prépare dans l’enseignement supérieur, allez sur le site http://www.coursera.com. La start-up Coursera, fondée par deux professeurs de Stanford, est une plate-forme sur laquelle plus de 60 universités (pour la plupart américaines) offrent des cours en ligne. Sur sa page d’accueil s’affichent le nombre des formations proposées - près de 500, allant de la robotique à l’histoire de l’art chinois, de l’évaluation financière de l’entreprise à l’analyse combinatoire - et celui des étudiants inscrits : plus de 5 millions à travers le monde, augmentant d’une dizaine par minute. Suite...

New study finds that many colleges, indeed up to half in a sample, are pondering the development of their own MOOCs, Massive Open Online Courses. Most seem to be "skinny dipping" in the market, interested in producing a MOOC in a niche area as a hedge to potential wide scale changes in higher education over the next five years. More...

By Jeff Borden. Earlier this month, I went to an eLearning conference in Saudi Arabia and again, the topic of Massive Open Online Courses, or MOOCs, came up. But, they were discussed very differently at this conference than I have described in past posts. For the past few years, I have noted that MOOCs are the easiest way to get attendance at eLearning conference presentations. About 25-35% of conference sessions talked about the  – mostly from a, “How You Can Do It” perspective although there were always a few asking if we should, “Believe The Hype?”
But at this conference, it was stated as official — “The Hype Is Over.” This was stated emphatically by both an American keynote presenter and by the Director of eLearning for the main University in the Kingdom. They both noted that MOOCs were just simply given too much credit out of the gate and that they often took away from the real conversation of eLearning. More...

By Jenny Mackness. As xMOOCs become more successful and begin to experiment with pedagogies that go beyond the didactic video lecture approach, I have been trying to understand the essential differences between the original connectivist MOOCs such as CCK08 and the current xMOOCs such as those offered by Coursera.