By . Tomorrow a new MOOC on leadership can be followed on the Canvas.Net platform. The Leadership for Real MOOC is of interest to me as it envisioned by Bert De Coutere at the Center for Creative Leadership and we had some great meetings figuring out what could be in, where possible foci might be. The CCL has been in the top 10 of the Financial Time rankings for executive education for 12 years in a row, so they are strong in what they do. More...
MOOC Convenes Educators, Employers, and Workforce Developers to Explore Role and Impact of Badges for Academic and Workplace Credential.
The WICHE Cooperative for Educational Technologies (WCET), Mozilla, Blackboard Inc., and Sage Road Solutions LLC will convene a massive, open, online course (MOOC)beginning September 9, 2013, to explore the role that badges are expected to play as academic institutions and employers scramble for new ways to document completion, competency and achievement. During its six-week duration, MOOC participants from around the world will use a variety of distributed technologies to connect and learn more about how to design, use and support these new systems for creating quality professional credentials. Read more...
By . Now that MOOCs are hitting the scene, everyone wants to jump on board! Granted, some want to get into the game in the hopes of making a quick dollar (somehow?), but others genuinely want to know how they can create their own MOOC for educational purposes. Well, you have options!
More providers are likely to spring up as we will only cover five potential options. As the entire MOOC industry evolves, expect to see more options at your disposal for this kind of thing. Kind of like when Wikipedia hit the scenes, we saw an influx of “Wikipedia-like” sites, templates, and software. More...
By Marc Parry, The Chronicle of Higher Education. Mitchell Duneier once was a MOOC star. But today he's more like a conscientious objector. Worried that massive open online courses might lead United States legislators to cut state university budgets, the Princeton University sociology professor has pulled out of the movement – at least for now. More...By . Hi all! It is, as always, some combination of fun and anxiety-producing to be guest blogging here again. Many thanks to Brian for inviting me back, and happy start of the fall term to everyone.
So my unit is making a MOOC.
I will admit that I’ve been underwhelmed with much of the hand-wringing about MOOCs. Most of the time the critique seems to be that they will threaten the traditional classroom. I’m just not that convinced that the kinds of traditional classrooms they plausibly threaten - mostly overcrowded, underfunded classrooms taught by underpaid, undersupported adjuncts - are serving anyone so wonderfully that they don’t deserve a little healthy competition. This widely-circulated letter from the San Jose State University Philosophy Department articulates powerful criticisms of Michael Sandel’s MOOC, but they seemed to me to be specific to that class and not generalizable to the technology as a whole. Watching my colleagues put a MOOC together, I am pretty impressed with the technological and pedagogical creativity involved. I am not prone to nostalgia or luddism, and it strikes me as an utterly open question whether the traditional classroom is the best educational forum for the vast majority of students who are not enrolled in fancy advanced seminars at top schools.
Now that I am in on the making of one of these, though, it seems to me that there are interesting problems they raise that are getting little to no attention. I want to mention a couple, although I can’t delve into them in detail in a blog post. I don’t claim these are the most pressing issues MOOCs raise; they are just examples. More..
By Carl Straumsheim. Despite the talk about how massive open online courses, or MOOCs, will dramatically alter the landscape of higher education, the courses have in some ways taken academe back -- to the days of huge gender gaps, when senior scholars overwhelmingly were men. An unofficial count by Inside Higher Ed shows 8 of the 63 courses listed on edX’s website are taught by women, and an additional 8 are taught by mixed-gender groups. Of Coursera’s 432 courses, 121 feature at least one female instructor and 71 taught exclusively by them. Udacity lists 29 courses on its website, and while only two are taught by women, many of them were created by female course developers. Read more...
By Chris Parr. One of the first Moocs on the FutureLearn platform will be a University of Southampton web science course beginning on November 11, it has emerged. Although Southampton offers both a master’s and an undergraduate degree in web science, its massive open online course will not be a direct port of an existing module. Rather, it will be a “mini” course, designed to offer a taster of what students might experience were they to take a paid course at the university.
“It’s an introduction to web science – I think it could be studied by anyone who is interested in studying web science at master’s or undergraduate level,” said Dame Wendy Hall, professor of computer science at Southampton, who has already recorded some videos that will form part of the Mooc. More...
The first group of participants has recently completed the Open Course in Technology Enhanced Learning (ocTEL), a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC), aimed at helping those delivering higher education to make best use of technology.
The ocTEL programme was organised by the Association for Learning Technology (ALT) and funded by HEFCE and the Leadership Foundation for Higher Education through the Innovation and Transformation Fund (note 1).
This is a MOOC in which:
A key innovation was the open platform used for the MOOC. One of the features was the TagsExplorer which provided a view of ocTEL-related questions on Twitter, as well as an experimental visualisation of all tweets. Using this web-based tool, participants could experience the digital interactivity with social media as it happened.
The materials will remain available for the next few months.
Notes
By Marc Parry. Mitchell Duneier once was a MOOC star. But today he's more like a conscientious objector. Worried that the massive open online courses might lead legislators to cut state-university budgets, the Princeton University sociology professor has pulled out of the movement—at least for now.
After teaching introductory sociology through Coursera last year, Mr. Duneier extolled his experience in a Chronicle commentary. The New York Times featured him on its front page, and Thomas L. Friedman wrote about him in a column. One of Coursera's founders, Daphne Koller, plugged his course in a TED talk. More...
By . The popular MOOC Think Again: How to Reason and Argue, co-taught by Walter Sinott-Armstrong, Chauncey Stillman Professor in Practical Ethics in Duke’s Department of Philosophy, and Ram Neta, Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, is currently being offered for a second time. The course aims to teach students how to understand and assess arguments made by other people, and how to construct good arguments of their own. Over 130,000 students (and counting!) have already enrolled for the current session, and the course stands as one of the most popular offered via the Coursera platform. Read more...
/https%3A%2F%2Fprofilepics.canalblog.com%2Fprofilepics%2F1%2F0%2F1076071.jpg)
