Both MOOCs and Textbooks Will End Up Courseware
Mike Caulfield, Hapgood, January 30, 2013

Where are MOOCs headed? Not toward massive classes, writes Mike Caulfield. "It’s broadly used courseware — software that provides much of the skeleton of standard classes the way publisher texts do today." That's my call as well. More...

Revolution Hits the Universities
Thomas L. Friedman, New York Times, January 28, 2013

Thomas L. Friedman gushes about MOOCs. "I can see a day soon where you’ll create your own college degree by taking the best online courses from the best professors from around the world — some computing from Stanford, some entrepreneurship from Wharton, some ethics from Brandeis, some literature from Edinburgh — paying only the nominal fee for the certificates of completion. It will change teaching, learning and the pathway to employment." I think we need to understand that 'best' does not mean (as it currently seems to) 'best marketed'. More...

Moving Towards a Culture of Learning #MOOCs
Miguel Guhlin, Around the Corner-MGuhlin.org, January 28, 2013

Miguel Guhlin (citing Lisa M. Lane) divides MOOCs into three categories:

• Network-based MOOCs - "the goal is not so much content and skills acquisition, but conversation, socially constructed knowledge, and exposure to the milieu of learning on the open web using distributed means."
• Task-based MOOCs - "emphasize skills in the sense that they ask the learner to complete certain types of work."
• Content-based MOOCs - "the ones with huge enrollments, commercial prospects, big university professors, automated testing, and exposure in the popular press..."

People haven't really been talking about the task-based courses, but these are probably the most interesting of the bunch, as the tasks can be automated, and the system can step you through a series of actvities. More...