By Polina Kroik. Despite ongoing debate about the benefits of massively open online courses (MOOCs), such courses have been greeted with unabated enthusiasm by administrators at financially strapped public universities. The State University of New York, the Georgia Institute of Technology, San Jose State University (SJSU), and many others have signed agreements with the for-profit start-ups Udacity and Coursera, and the non-profit edX, to offer MOOCs through their systems. State legislators have also jumped on board, proposing bills in Florida and California that encourage public universities to use MOOCs as part of their curriculum. But problems with these high-enrollment online courses have come to light. Last week, SJSU announced that it was putting its experimental MOOC program on hold, after the first term of such courses resulted in a low pass rate. On the national stage, some administrators are voicing concerns about the hasty adoption of this new and a largely untested system. Full article...

By Marie Boran. Free online courses allow anyone, regardless of educational qualifications, to study whatever they like. “Online education has been around for decades. The thing that has really changed is that we now have the technology for one lecturer to teach a hundred thousand students. It changes the economics of higher education and allows us to take the most amazing courses in the world and give them away for free.”
Andrew Ng, computer science lecturer at Stanford University and co-founder of Coursera. org, is talking about MOOCs, or Massive Open Online Courses. In the past year, millions of people have enrolled in these courses, mostly through the big three MOOC providers, Coursera, Udacity and edX. Read more...

By Bonnie Stewart. Understanding MOOCs as a battle between marketization and traditional higher education blocks us from envisioning other viable futures for higher education. In the ongoing buzz and backlash around MOOCs (massive open online courses) clogging higher education news these days, the narratives are hardening. Dialogue around change in higher education increasingly centres on the illusion of a simple divide: the business model of disruption vs. the status quo of college, idealized. One side heralds revolution and increased democratic access to education: a glorious future, largely defined in corporate terms. The other side, unswayed by business jargon, defends its historical territory by painting MOOCs as corporate behemoths of privatization and bad online pedagogy.
There’s truth on both sides. But taken up as the two poles of a binary horizon, these narratives stifle vision. They incline us to understand the big picture around MOOCs – and whatever follows MOOCs in the flavor of the month parade – as one of marketization vs. traditional institutional education, full-stop. That binary stands in the way of envisioning viable alternate futures for higher education. Read more...