The World Bank has signed an agreement with Coursera, a leading provider of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), to help meet the demand for practical solutions-oriented learning on pressing issues in developing countries.  Ending extreme poverty within a generation and boosting shared prosperity among the bottom 40 percent of the population in developing countries are the goals guiding the World Bank Group's work.
These Massive Open Online Courses will be offered as part of the new Open Learning Campus being built by the World Bank, where practitioners, development partners, and the general public can more systematically access real-time, relevant and world-class learning. The Bank has offered e-learning successfully through its e-institute in critical areas of development, such as health, education, urban development and climate change, and is now planning to scale up its offerings through the Campus and through partnerships with regional and country-based institutions and via innovative delivery vehicles. This partnership with Coursera will give people across the globe easier access to valuable, evidence-based knowledge on complex development problems. Working together with 91 educational institutions across four continents, Coursera now offers more than 450 free online college-level courses to 5 million students around the world. More...

“Coursera is nowhere near to making a profit.” Op het congres van ACA en EUA zijn de grote verwachtingen rond MOOCs nogal getemperd. Geen directe bedreiging voor klassieke universiteiten, denkt men, wel een impuls om anders over hoger onderwijs te durven denken.
Op het symposium ‘Making sense of the MOOCs’ in Brussel waren bestuurders, docenten en onderzoekers afgekomen, die zich allen bezighielden met het nieuwe hoger onderwijsfenomeen. Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) zijn hot, daar kon zelfs een zeer kritisch rapport van European Universities  Association (EUA) eerder dit jaar niets aan veranderen. More...

By Kristina D. Lorch. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s MOOC Research Initiative has granted HarvardX $21,450 to study how massive open online courses might be made more personalized for individuals in online courses everywhere, HarvardX announced Tuesday.
Led by Sergiy Nesterko, a HarvardX research fellow, and Svetlana I. Dotsenko ’10, founder of startup Project Lever, the study will take self-reported data from those enrolled in HarvardX classes, including country of origin, education level, gender, age, and usage of the course materials. The study will also look at individuals’ learning outcomes and goals.
“We want to...track how those goals manifest themselves in the students’ usage of courses, and ideally would see how those learning goals change over time and come up with a predictive system or a meaningful clustering of students,” Nesterko said in a phone interview.
The study will examine data from 17 HarvardX courses, five of which will have been completed before December 2013. More...

By Svetlana Dotsenko. Growing proliferation of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) is having a profound (if not fully understood) effect on education. MOOCs, compared to traditional classrooms, have impressively high enrollment, introduce more diversity into student population, and show better learning outcomes among students. MOOCs are arguably "changing higher learning forever".
However, learning is not the sole function of education; creating knowledge, or doing research, is another responsibility of academia. While MOOCs produce armies of learners, it is unclear if they are going to inspire the next generation of scientific discovery. The effect of growing proliferation of MOOCs on creating knowledge is not yet known, nor has it been studied systematically. More...

By Matthew T. Grant. In his article “Will MOOCs help you open career doors?” Scott Kirsner reveals that, while employers may be impressed by the initiative that completing a MOOC signifies, they are more interested in seeing what can be accomplished with one’s newly-won knowledge. In other words, it’s not about certificates of completion in the real world, it’s about completed pieces in a portfolio.
Working as I do for a staffing firm, I couldn’t agree more. In fact, when we launched our own MOOC program, we made employability a top objective. Here’s how the MOOC model can be modified to meet both the needs of the students and those of the companies they would like to work for. More...

By Natasha Lomas. Berlin-based MOOCs startup iversity, which last year began a pivot away from online learning collaboration tools with the aim of becoming the Coursera of Europe, is launching its first clutch of free online courses today.
Back in March, iversity told TechCrunch it was hoping to attract six-digits’ worth of students at the launch of its MOOCs. And it’s managed to do so — saying initial student sign-ups have exceeded 100,000. More...

By Christina Quattrocchi. Pair MOOC provider, Coursera, with teacher training experts at the New Teacher Center, and you get a different breed of professional development--one where teachers choose and there are options for everyone. This is in stark contrast to the one-size-fits-all trainings typically mandated by districts.
Coursera began its foray into the teacher professional development world last May when it launched new partnerships with the likes of John Hopkins University School of Education, Relay Graduate School, and the New Teacher Center. More...

By Michael Horn. The emerging world of K–12 blended learning remains a young field full of promise for personalizing learning and boosting outcomes for all students. More and more bright spots are emerging every day.
But there are also challenges. With the buzz surrounding 1:1 device programs and new classroom apps, there are risks that people might just take education technologies and layer it over the existing monolithic classroom processes and not fundamentally change the way students learn. The hype around and cramming of technology remains a serious risk to the field. More...

Sur le blog Educpros de Brigitte Fournier. Tandis que les États-Unis découvrent les  SPOCs (les cours en ligne soumis à un processus de sélection et destinés  à un nombre restreints de participants), l’Europe se réconcilie enfin avec les MOOCs(les cours en ligne ouverts et massifs, voir précédent article). Le mois dernier, la Commission européenne a lancé Open Education Europa, un site web qui servira de porte d’entrée unique à l’éducation ouverte européenne. Ce lancement fait partie de l’initiative « Ouvrir l’éducation », lancée aussi en septembre par la Commission « pour stimuler l’innovation et les compétences numériques dans les écoles et les universités ». Dans l’enseignement supérieur, cela se traduit par la facilitation de l’introduction des MOOCS dans les institutions. More...