By Dave Malicke. Professor Charles Severance (“Dr. Chuck”) is a clinical associate professor at the University of Michigan School of Information (UMSI). Dr. Chuck has already made legendary contributions to the OER and MOOC movements. He’s held “office hours” with small groups of MOOC students from all over the world, was the first U-M faculty member to apply CC licenses to materials offered within Coursera, authored two openly-licensed textbooks (Python for Informatics, and High Performance Computing), was a leading developer of and evangelist for the IMS Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI) standard, and has reached thousands of learners through Dr. Chuck Online, P2PU, Open.Michigan, and the iBooks store.

So what’s next for Dr. Chuck?

Programming for Everybody, a new U-M MOOC scheduled to start on Coursera on April 10, 2014. This free course will focus on teaching the basics of Python programming (with no complex math) to beginners from all backgrounds. Participants can expect to learn both how to program and where these skills can be applied. But that’s just the beginning of the story. More...

By Stephan Westlake. The world of online education got a major boost last week when Coursera, the two-year-old startup that provides open courses online, named a former Yale University President as its new chief executive.
Online learning enthusiasts were quick to perceive Richard Levin’s arrival at Coursera as evidence that massive open online courses – or MOOCs – are being embraced by leaders of traditional learning as the future of higher education. More...