By Mike Boxall. Twelve British universities are launching a free online course – or "Mooc" – service called Futurelearn. Mike Boxall explains why they're right to invest their financial futures in this untested model.
Few people would bet on the prospects of a business that gave away its products, complete with customer support, free to anyone anywhere with an internet connection. Yet this is exactly what the Open University, along 11 other leading British universities, is offering with the new Futurelearn service announced last week.
Futurelearn is the latest in the wave of Moocs (Massive Open Online Courses) launched by consortia of world-ranked universities over the past year. New players like Coursera, Udacity and edX have recruited millions of students to hundreds of degree-style courses from top-name institutions, all for free. Read more...

By Clay Shirky. Academics have watched the internet change the music industry, books and news. And yet, now it's happening in higher education, we are about to screw it up, says Clay Shirky
Fifteen years ago, a research group called The Fraunhofer Institute announced a new digital format for compressing movie files. This wasn't a terribly momentous invention, but it did have one interesting side-effect: Fraunhofer also had to figure out how to compress the soundtrack. The result was the Motion Picture Experts Group Format 1, Audio Layer III, a format you know and love, though only by its acronym, MP3.
The recording industry concluded this new format would be no threat, because quality mattered most. Who would listen to an MP3 when they could buy a better-sounding CD? Then Napster launched, and quickly became the fastest-growing piece of software in history. The industry sued Napster and won, and it collapsed even more suddenly than it had arisen. Read more...

By Marc Parry. During the New Deal of the 1930s, the Works Progress Administration hired writers to document history across the United States. The best-known effort collected oral histories of former slaves. Those interviews became the bedrock of research for decades, contributing to a reinterpretation of slavery that took place from the 1950s to the 1980s, says William G. Thomas III, a historian at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln.
Mr. Thomas sees something similar as possible today. He and others are trying to build a movement to gather “the people’s history.” And their project could spawn a new model for massive open online courses, or MOOC’s. Read more...

By Doug Guthrie. Like lemmings, too many American colleges are mindlessly rushing out to find a way to deliver online education, and more and more often they are choosing Coursera. The company, founded this year by two Stanford University computer scientists, has already enrolled more than two million students, has engaged 33 academic institutions as partners, and is offering more than 200 free massive open online courses, or MOOC's.
A college's decision to jump on the Coursera bandwagon is aided—and eased—by knowing that academic heavyweights like Harvard, Stanford, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are already on board. As one college president described it to The New York Times, "You're known by your partners, and this is the College of Cardinals."
In our haste to join the academic alphas, many of us are forgoing the reflection necessary to enter this new medium. Our resolve to act swiftly belies the serious nature of this next phase of higher education's evolution. There are critical pedagogical issues at stake in the online market, and MOOC's have not done nearly enough to deal with those concerns. Read more...

By Chris Parr. Traditional values for OU-led Mooc platform that aims to rival US providers.
The institutions chosen to feature on the UK's new open online course platform have been selected on the basis of their performance in domestic league tables, according to the vice-chancellor of The Open University, which is leading the project.
Last week, the institution launched Futurelearn, which will carry so-called "Moocs" (massive open online courses) from 12 UK universities and aims to rival US providers such as Coursera, Udacity and edX.
Futurelearn is the first UK-based Mooc platform. Eight of the universities are members of the Russell Group of large research-intensive institutions, two are from the 1994 Group of small research-intensives, one is non-aligned and The Open University is part of the University Alliance. Read more...

By Chris Parr. A UK-based platform for massive open online courses (Moocs) to rival established providers in the US has been launched by The Open University.
Futurelearn will carry courses from 12 UK institutions (see list), which will be available to students across the world free of charge.
It will follow in the footsteps of US providers including Coursera, edX and Udacity, which offer around 230 Moocs from around 40 mostly US-based institutions to more than 3 million students.
The new platform will operate as an independent company, majority owned by The Open University, although details of other investors have yet to be confirmed.
Simon Nelson, a key player in the development of BBC's online offerings, including the iPlayer, has been recruited to head up the new company. Read more...

By Marc Parry. Earlier this month, one of Britain’s top newspapers noticed a glaring absence on the British education scene: MOOC’s. “U.K. universities are wary of getting on board the MOOC train,” read The Guardian’s headline. Two institutions, the Universities of Edinburgh and London, have recently signed on to offer massive open online courses via the American company Coursera. Yet in Britain, said the newspaper, “there is scarcely a whiff of the evangelism and excitement bubbling away in America, where venture capitalists and leading universities are ploughing millions” into MOOC’s. Read more...

© Kelformation - Marion Senant. Face à la pénurie de candidats qui répondaient aux exigences de ses clients, l’agence de recrutement temporaire Aquent a décidé de lancer le premier MOOC d’entreprise. En un mois, elle a formé 2000 personnes dans le monde entier et placé 142 candidats.
Trouver les bons candidats pour des missions, c’est la mission d’Aquent, une société internationale de recrutement temporaire. Mais dans ses domaines de prédilection: l’IT, le marketing et le design digital, les compétences évoluent à toute vitesse et ses recrues ne parviennent pas toujours à suivre le rythme. Une enquête de l’Apec révèle ainsi qu'en France, 70% des recruteurs de l’IT ont eu du mal à pourvoir des postes au premier semestre 2012, faute de candidats suffisamment compétents. Suite de l'article...

By Rosanna Tamburri. Whether you see them as a catalyst for change or mostly as hype, MOOCs are fundamentally different from other forays into open online learning.
A poetry appreciation class for 30,000 – what’s that like? Hear the author talk about her experiences as a MOOC student in the latest Reporter's Notebook podcast.
It’s been 25 years since I last set foot in a university classroom and, to be honest, the thought of doing so now makes me a little uneasy. Not that I’ll be in a classroom per se this time round. The 10-week course on modern and contemporary American poetry that I’ve enrolled in through Coursera is taught solely online.
An introductory email from the instructor, University of Pennsylvania English professor Al Filreis, assured me that I didn’t need to know a thing about poetry to succeed in the class. But he too admitted to some trepidation. It would be a challenge, he wrote, to judge how well everyone is doing – all 30,000 of us. We would use online chat groups to discuss the poems and peer-to-peer grading to assess one another’s writing assignments. There would be weekly quizzes and four short essays and if I complete them all, I’ll get a certificate.
Week one gets under way with a look at the poetry of Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman. After reading Dickinson’s “I dwell in Possibility –” I watch a 20-minute video of the engaging Dr. Filreis and his TAs parsing its meaning. We are invited to do the same on one of the several chat groups that have sprung up on the site. At the end of the week I attempt my first quiz, two short multiple-choice questions. I score 100 percent on the first question and 80 on the second. All in all, not too bad a beginning. Read more...