Blog Educpros de Gilbert Azoulay. ESCP Europe lance à son tour son premier MOOC consacré à la logique comptable. Une expérimentation destinée à l’acquisition des bases pour les étudiants qui intègrent la formation en cours de route. Selon Joëlle Le Vourc’h, professeur à l’origine de cette initiative, ses collègues pourront – enfin – se consacrer aux enseignements à forte valeur ajoutée et s’appuyer sur le numérique pour transmettre les fondamentaux. Au final, les MOOC deviennent une opportunité formidable pour mener leurs recherches. Démonstration.
Vous lancez un MOOC, vous cédez à un effet de mode ?
Nous répondons simplement à la préoccupation de former les étudiants qui arrivent au niveau master sans formation à la gestion (ingénieurs, médecins, pharmaciens, littéraires…). L’objectif était de trouver un moyen de délivrer les cours de bases auxquels ils n’ont pas eu accès en raison de leur spécialité. En aucun cas nous n’avons cédé à un effet de mode car notre objectif est d’abord de faciliter l’acquisition des bases. Notre démarche consiste à passer par une phase d’expérimentation avant de la démultiplier si les retours sont convaincants. Suite de l'article...

By Jonathan Tapson. A lot can change in a year. Twelve months ago, the traditional universities were doomed, condemned to irrelevance by an onslaught of MOOCs. Not every last one of them was going to die; Sebastian Thrun said that perhaps ten might survive. This was not very reassuring for the executives, staff, students, and alumni of the 20,000 universities which don’t fall into the top-10, when ranked according to the criterion: “Universities which will survive MOOCs.”  We haven’t yet seen this category in the Times Higher Ed rankings, but we are sure its appearance is imminent. One year later, it seems that, like Mark Twain’s, reports of these deaths are greatly exaggerated. In fact, as a Slate writer put it, “Anti-MOOC really is the new black.“  San Jose’s State University’s MOOCs-for-credit experiment has ended in qualified failure. There has been a plethora of articles and commentaries suggesting that the MOOCs were all just a bad dream, and we can go back to the chalkboard with a sigh of relief. More...

In my previous post, we talked about the general information available on MOOCs and contemplated the frequently asked questions. In nutshell, launching a MOOC requires the following:
1. A great idea for a course
2. A great plan
2. Lots of time for creating content
3. A platform to host the MOOC
4. A good social media campaign
5. A group of teachers you can rely on
Lets assume you have the idea and the plan. And the content is ready too. In this post, we talk about the technological aspect of MOOCing aka the possibilities of hosting a MOOC via WizIQ Virtual Classroom, and how should you go about it.

The MERLOT Journal of Online Learning and Teaching (JOLT) have published a special issue on MOOCs which is now available online.
JOLT is a peer-reviewed, open-access, online publication that aims to promote scholarship in the use of the Internet and web-based multimedia resources in higher education.
Their current special issue on MOOCs includes research papers and case studies from experts within the field. All papers can be accessed for free in HTML or PDF format.
You can find the full contents here. 

By Ellis Booker. Universities investing in massive open online courses face an uncertain payoff.
Massive open online courses are proliferating, despite the many unanswered questions about how they will pay off for their creators.
According to a curated list compiled by TechnoDuet, there are nearly 40 MOOC providers worldwide today.
Another resource documenting this growth is the MOOC Map, an interactive visualization showing the geographic spread of MOOCs from six providers (Coursera, Instructure, Blackboard, edX, FutureLearn and Open2Study).
The fastest-growing purveyor, Coursera, now claims 4 million students across four continents and 83 college partners. Read more...

By Geoff Cain. I read an article this week that I found via Stephen Downe's blog that is from the eLearning Africa News Portal called "The Underlying Inequality of MOOCs" by Alicia Mitchell. The main issue that Mitchell has with MOOCs is an old argument against all online education: the "digital divide." Unlike the education writers of the 1990s, she looks at the issues of poverty and connectivity and says that we have to be mindful that not everyone has access or the same means and skills that those of us in more privileged parts of the world may have. I do not argue that there is not a digital divide, I just don't think stopping online learning is a great solution to that problem. She does not make the leap that many have in the past with a "therefore," online learning is not viable or should be curtailed etc. I actually agree with her and my "therefore" is that, broadly, we need to continue to work for economic justice and universal education.  Africa is a hot bed of online learning, open education resources, and innovation specifically because of the problems discussed in her article. And my more focused "therefore" is say this is exactly why we need a MOOC to help students "learn how to learn." That is what we were getting at when we created "DE 101" - an free, two-week, fully online orientation to online learning. That was in a "traditional" online course format. The one I am working on here at Humboldt State University will be a MOOC called "eLearning 101." Read more...

By Sylvia Moessinger. Hello and welcome back to another part of the “MOOC around the world” series. Some of you might have a sense of déjà vu, but this is not a repetition of my other five parts, but indeed the sixth part of my MOOC journey. I know it’s like a never-ending story, but MOOCs mushroom faster than I can write and more parts might follow.
For those who just joined the MOOC marathon, my original goal was to explore all the MOOC resources outside of the best-known platforms in the United States (Coursera, edX and Udacity) to draw attention to less familiar opportunities, both in English and in other languages. Here is a short review of the previous legs of the journey.
Starting in Germany, I traveled through several European countries including the U.K., Ireland, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Spain and Portugal (part 1 and part 2). Then I embarked for distant shores, trying to identify all the MOOCs in Australia, India and South America (part 3). In part 4 of my voyage, I toured through Canada, which is where MOOCs were originated by educators George Siemens and Stephen Downes. I also took a a quick dash through the U.S. to look at open courses on less-familiar platforms, and in part 5 I sampled some of the entirely “independent” MOOCs in the U.S. not offered in a platform at all. Read more...

elearnspace

Valerie Irvine, Jillianne Code, and I spent time over the past 8 months preparing a special issue of JOLT on massive open online courses. The issue is now available.
From our intro:
Higher education is entering a phase of dramatic change and innovation. Mainstream media often present massive open online courses (MOOCs) as both a reflection of the need for universities to undergo a metamorphosis and as a means of forcing a new perspective on digital teaching and learning practices (i.e., Lewin, 2013; Pappano, 2012). However, university faculty caution that there is not enough research evidence to support widespread adoption. Two significant challenges around the role of MOOCs in higher education are prevalent. First, the discussion on MOOCs to-date has occurred mainly in mainstream media and trade publications. Although some peer-reviewed articles on MOOCs currently exist (e.g., Fini, 2009; Kop, 2011), the amount of available research is generally limited. One of the goals of this special issue is to attempt to address this lack of peer reviewed literature. Second, the vast research available in online and distance education has been largely ignored by mainstream media and MOOC providers. Paying greater attention to what is already known about learning in online and virtual spaces, how the role of educators and learners is transformed in these contexts, and how social networks extend a learning network will enable mainstream MOOC providers and their partners to make evidence-based decisions in favor of educational reform. Thus, a second goal of this special issue is to highlight this research and provide an historical context for online and distance learning not currently evident in the mainstream media treatment of MOOCs.