MOOC-Covered Towers? Online Education's Coming Impact on Traditional College
Scott D. Miller, Huffington Post, January 28, 2013

I tend not to link to Huffington Post articles because the pages have so many widgets they're unpleasant to read. But I wanted to like to this item, the upshot of which is "The challenge is to figure out how to embrace MOOCs and other technological innovations so that they best complement, not replace, that primary and original learning experience." Fair enough, but as Lydia Cline points our in an article, Udacity recently sold a MOOC to San Jose State University, and she suggests (in this LinkedIn thread) that "what I see happening is the flagship MOOC providers (the ones run by Ivy League profs) selling canned courses to all other schools, and the profs at those schools being turned into TAs for the courses. Or just fired and replaced with cheaper TAs." Of course, thus has ever been the lament of traditional faculty regarding online learning. More...

Lessons learned from wrestling with a MOOC
Robert Talbert, Casting Out Nines, January 18, 2013

I think it's useful to include opportunity cost when calculating the cost of an eductaion. A case in point: the free MOOC. Robert Talbert reports, "this week has me reconsidering the notion that MOOCs are “free”. They may not cost anything, but there is an expense, namely time. That '3–5 hour workload' estimate turned out to be wildly underestimated, at least for newbies like me." It makes me think of my own university experience - while other people used weekends to socialize, work on projects and network, I was pulling my two weekend night-shifts at 7-Eleven. More...

#diffimooc Launches next week: Differenting instruction in a MOOC
Vicki A. Davis, Cool Cat Teacher Blog, January 18, 2013

Vicki Davis introduces a post describing a new MOOC from the frozen north: "Next week will be the official start of the Differentiating Instruction through Technology #diffimooc offered by the University of Alaska Southeast. This class is designed to help pre-service, in-service, formal or informal teachers in gaining strategies to differentiate student instruction through the environment, through process and through product. More...

MOOCs: ‘dropout’ a category mistake, look at ‘uptake’?
Donald Clark, Donald Clark Plan B, January 17, 2013

Donald Clark is on point in this reframing of the 'dropout argument' against MOOCs: "We need to look at uptake, not dropout. It’s astonishing that MOOCs exist at all, never mind the millions, and shortly many millions, who have given them a go. Dropout is a highly pejorative term that comes from ‘schooling’. The ‘high school dropout’. More...

What Makes a MOOC Massive?
Stephen Downes, Half an Hour, January 17, 2013

I've been asked this a few times recently, so I thought I should expend a few paragraphs describing the difference between online courses that are and are not 'massive'. I argue, first, that it's not the raw count of participants that's important, but how the course is structured. It's not simply a big course. Then given that caveat I go on to explain that a course needs 150 active participants to be thought of as 'massive' - this because 150 people - Dunbar's Number - is more than any one person can attend to, and hence is a course that will resist groupish properties (such as an emphasis on sameness rather than diversity).
[Link] [Comment]. More...

Could a MOOCI Contribute to the Education of the World’s Most Impoverished Children?
John Connell, Weblog, January 9, 2013.

Let's map out the core dilemma that produces the idea (quoting from the text):

• good-quality teaching should be central to good educational provision, and most especially for the education of young children
• there is a massive shortage of good-quality teachers across the developing world

Anmeldung
Monika Koenig, Dörte Giebel and Heinz Wittenbrink, MOOC, January 5, 2013.

About MOOC Completion Rates: The Importance of Student Investment
Tucker Balch, , January 11, 2013.

When you look at how many people clicked on the login form, completion rates in a MOOC are very low. But when you look at those who completed teh first assignment, completion rates are much higher. Investment matters. More...

The mixably Open Online Course (mOOC)
Mike Caulfield, Weblog, January 4, 2013.

Two part presentation (Part One, Part Two) on the structure of open online courses. "This is an off the cuff presentation of the module structure in the Psych course we are developing, which shows some of the possibilities of combining multiple OER into a course designed for institutional reuse." This model reminds me of the Assiniboine Model, which I developed (and built software supporting) in 1997. More...