By Clay Shirky. I wrote a thing last fall about massive open online courses (MOOCs, in the parlance), and the challenge that free or cheap online classes pose to business as usual in higher ed. In that piece, I compared the people running colleges today to music industry executives in the age of Napster. (This was not a flattering comparison.) Aaron Bady, a cultural critic and doctoral candidate at Berkeley, objected. I replied to Bady, one thing led to another, the slippery slope was slupped, and Maria Bustillos ended up refereeing the whole thing here on The Awl.
Bustillos sees institutions like San Jose State experimenting with credit for online courses from startups like Udacity, and asks: "are we willing to jeopardize the education of young people (at the cost of millions or billions in public funds) on a bet like that?” Read more...

By Simon Bradley. Free interactive online university courses known as MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) are quickly spreading far beyond the United States. After Lausanne’s Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL), other Swiss universities are keen to experiment.
But not everyone is convinced: some sceptics say MOOCs are not particularly innovative and just a new marketing opportunity.
Last year witnessed an e-learning explosion as MOOC madness took over higher education. Eager not to miss out on this new trend, top universities from around the world are joining platform providers such as Coursera and Udacity, or forming their own ventures like edX and Futurelearn, while individual initiatives are also being spawned.
EPFL is an early MOOC adopter. It became one of Coursera’s 33 university partners last June offering a course in Scala computer programming to which 53,000 students signed up, five times the number on campus. Read more...

By Steve Kolowich. In what could be a major step toward bridging the gap between massive open online courses and the credentialing system that they are supposed to "disrupt," the American Council on Education on Thursday endorsed five MOOCs for credit.
Two of the approved courses, "Introduction to Genetics and Evolution" and "Bioelectricity: A Quantitative Approach," come from Duke University. Two others, "Pre-Calculus" and "Algebra," come from the University of California at Irvine. The last, "Calculus: Single-Variable," comes from the University of Pennsylvania. All five are offered through Coursera.
The council, an association that advises college presidents, operates a credit-recommendation service that evaluates individual courses. If a course passes muster, ACE advises its 1,800 member colleges that they can be comfortable conferring credit on students who have passed that course. Read more...

By Scott Jaschik. Maybe it was inevitable that one of the new massive open online courses would crash. After all, MOOCs are being launched with considerable speed, not to mention hype. But MOOC advocates might have preferred the collapse of a course other than the one that was suspended this weekend, one week into instruction: "Fundamentals of Online Education: Planning and Application."
Technology and design problems are largely to blame for the course's problems. And many students are angry that a course about online education -- let alone one offered by the Georgia Institute of Technology -- wouldn't have figured out the tech issues in advance, or been able to respond quickly once they became evident. Many of the problems related to the course's use of Google Docs to sign up for group discussions. Among the comments on blogs and Twitter: "Wowzers, 40,000 students signed up for #foemooc considering google spreadsheets limit of 50 simultaneous editors ... not a good choice!" and "Egads, this group thing in #foemooc is a giant clusterf*#k." Read more...

By Kris Olds. The making of a MOOC at the University of Amsterdam by Arie K. den Boon
The sun is coming out from behind the clouds and makes the lake blindingly white. Skaters have come out in massive numbers on the first tour of the year on natural ice, starting uneasily but learning quickly with growing confidence. Skating is one of those things you only learn by doing.
While I am enjoying the beautiful landscape and concentrate on avoiding the sudden fissures in the ice, my mobile is receiving mails from the MOOC team, some 13 people working feverously to get their first MOOC out to the audience. We started with two: Rutger de Graaf, lecturer of the course Introduction to Communication Science and me, lobbying and trying to get people support the idea of an MOOC. We never expected we would have so many colleagues working on the project. It seemed quite simple to set up a course with video. When I did the Artificial Intelligence course of Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvik in late 2011, I was immediately aware that this was more inspiring than any online or offline college I had before. Read more...

By Fred Garnett. A month or so on from its PR launch, and with a steady trickle of press mentions since then (though no new updates on the website?), I’m guessing that the folk over at FutureLearn must be putting the hours in trying to work out what the platform offering will actually consist of, or what the sustainabilitybusiness model will actually be. (I have no inside information on the FutureLearn project…)
One of the things I have sort of picked up from online glimpses of things said and commented upon is that the USP is going to relate to the quality of teaching/pedagogy (erm, I think?!). I’m not sure if “proven” learning designs will be baked into the platform, constraining the way courses are delivered (in which case, there’s likely to be something of a bootstrap problem in getting the first courses out if they have to wait for the platform?) or whether the quality will flow “naturally” from the fact the the courses will be provided by British universities (?!), but if innovation is also to flow, it’ll be interesting to see how it’ll be supported…? Read more...

By Karen Head. In November 2012, I was part of a team that was awarded a grant by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to develop a MOOC for one of the most ubiquitous of university courses: freshman composition. Over the next five months, I will blog about our process. And I will try to address a central question surrounding the proliferation of massive open online courses. Many people argue that rising technologies could allow us to educate the world more efficiently. My question is, can we educate people more effectively?
I teach writing and direct a communication-tutoring center at the Georgia Institute of Technology. I’m also a writer. When I began teaching 15 years ago, I was one of the first instructors to volunteer to teach in a technology-augmented classroom. When online videoconferencing technology was introduced, I began holding office hours through that platform, and later did the same in Second Life. In short, I am no Luddite. However, I will admit to some reservations about whether a MOOC is the ideal platform for teaching writing. I have argued passionately for keeping composition classes small. Ultimately, I decided to pilot this MOOC because I am open to the possibilities, but I prefer to discover firsthand whether it works. Read more...

From The Chronicle. Textbook publishers argue that their newest digital products shouldn’t even be called “textbooks.” They’re really software programs built to deliver a mix of text, videos, and homework assignments. But delivering them is just the beginning. No old-school textbook was able to be customized for each student in the classroom. The books never graded the homework. And while they contain sample exam questions, they couldn’t administer the test themselves.
What’s happening right now is that xMOOCs are moving backwards into replicable content from the interaction and assessment pole while textbooks are  are moving forward into interaction and assessment from the replicable content pole. Read more...

By David Matthews. More than 300,000 people have signed up to the University of Edinburgh's free massive open online courses (Moocs) since they were first announced in July 2012, it has been revealed.
The university is offering six courses on the Coursera platform, which hosts Moocs primarily from universities in the United States.
For every student physically studying in Edinburgh, there are now ten online learners, a statement from the university says.
Timothy O'Shea, Edinburgh's vice-chancellor, said he was "delighted" that the courses had "caught the imagination of the public". Read more...