By Jon Erickson. MOOCs offer a number of potential benefits. Once developed and delivered at scale, the MOOC model is a much less labor-intensive approach to college education. MOOCs enable professors to spread their knowledge to vastly larger audiences, requiring fewer faculty than the traditional model. That can help alleviate instructional needs that will be created by the impending wave of faculty retirements as well as reduce the rising costs of a college education.
Read the related article.
There Is No Business Model for MOOCs Yet
By Ken Freeman. Currently there is not a sustainable business model for MOOCs. MOOCs are given away for free and MOOC platforms are still trying to figure out how to make money out of them.
What are the opportunities–and risks–in the Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) business model?
Opportunities:
Expand Reach–MOOCs have the potential to bring higher education and generate revenue from millions of students that don’t have access to today.
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MOOC quizzes: too easy, too hard or Goldilocks?
By Ralph K.M. Haurwitz. In just about any class, the tests are easier for some students than others. So, too, in "Take Your Medicine -- The Impact of Drug Development," a MOOC (massive open online course) I'm taking from the University of Texas.
Online discussions among students make that clear. A student whose handle is ShamJanesky expected higher-level questions: "At the moment, with those questions, I feel as I felt attending biology lessons at high school." More...
Gianpiero Petriglieri, Why I'm Skeptical About MOOCs | The Wall Street Journal
By Hilary Culbertson. Gianpiero Petriglieri, Why I'm Skeptical About MOOCs | The Wall Street Journal.
In a recent post on the Wall Street Journal, Gianpiero Petriglieri (associate professor of organizational behavior at INSEAD, and director of their Management Acceleration Programme for emerging leaders) discusses some of the potential perils and downfalls of the MOOC movement.
Read the full post: Gianpiero Petriglieri, Why I'm Skeptical About MOOCs | The Wall Street Journal. More...
What do Vampires and Twitter have in Common?
By Ernesto Priego. While I'm not sure the Twitter bird shares Dracula's thirst for blood (and I highly doubt vampires share the bluejay's affinity for posts under 140 characters), Twitter and Dracula do have one thing in common: they make for excellent class discussion.
While there's likely much other potential for Twitter in academia, my undergraduate English class at UW-Green Bay has utilized the social media feed as a medium for collaborative note-taking in our discussion-based course. Here's how we do it: we start with 6 books, 6 projects, and 6 groups; throughout the semester, the projects rotate between groups as we work through the different texts. My group was assigned the Twitter project for our time with Dracula. This project called for the six of us (in a class of roughly 35) to Tweet notable points of our classroom discussions on the book. We used the hashtag #Eng333Dracula to categorize our Tweets, and the hashtag's live-stream appeared on the board during discussion. Following class, we uploaded the Tweets to a Storify document, deleted duplicates, and added categories and explanations for confusing posts. You can find the end result here. More...
Draft Syllabus for Introduction to the Digital Humanities at Stockton College, Spring 2014
By Adeline Koh. I thought I'd share my draft syllabus for the Masters of American Studies course I will be teaching in Spring 2014, AMST 5011: Introduction to the Digital Humanities. For the first 6 weeks, we will be taking part in Cathy Davidson's Coursera course, "The History and Future of Higher Education," which will run both as a MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) as well as a DOCC (Distributed Online Collaborative Course).
AMST 5011 will be a hybrid course and materials will be made available on our Canvas website. (Note that as of October 11 the course website is still unpublished). More...
Where do we go from here? A comment on 'building' in the digital humanities
By Ernesto Priego. On 14 May 2013 I left a comment on this thread. I have edited and extended it a little bit and tried to correct some of the typos (my original comment is here). --some might remain and some new ones might have added though-- and have posted it again below, hoping it finds a new audience. It's not a proper essay about one single thing, but a series of thoughts I wanted to share.
To properly engage with academic debates online, one needs time and the right setting to sit down and go through the discussions and reply as one would like to. This means replying thoroughly, thoughtfully, including correct references and hyperlinks, engaging respectfully with the different points of view, remembering people’s names, etc.. Sadly, this is becoming increasingly difficult to do (I miss my students days!). The ability to do this is in itself a kind of privilege. More...
2014-2015 Distinguished Fellowships in Digital Humanities at the Graduate Center, City University of New York
By Matthew Gold. The Advanced Research Collaborative (ARC) of the Graduate Center, City University of New York, invites applicants for Distinguished Fellowships in the Humanities, Social Sciences, and Theoretical Sciences for the 2014 – 2015 academic year. Applicants should have outstanding records of published research and scholarship. For the academic year 2014-2015, preference will be given to scholars working in the areas of Immigration, Inequality and the Digital Humanities but applicants working in the areas listed on our website are also welcome to apply. More...
Merging and collaborating: two very different paths to digital humanities
By Ashleigh Faith. It seems like everyone is trying to come up with a witty introduction to their HASTAC Scholar's 2014 class post, and I admit I thought of doing that too, but I am a realist at heart so here goes.
My main research is: Ontology Visualization: Term search from indexing to retrieval. This encompasses a few themes: ontology is indexing, metadata, search, and content management as well as language, machine learning, and multilingual cognizance and psychology. What a mouthful! Visualization on the surface seems more simplistic –it’s a visual- but that also includes psychology, and a lot of the topics covered in ontology but with the scope of it being produced in a visual form. That in a nutshell, albeit a very large one, is what I am interested in. More...
Badges
By Michael Widdersheim. So far, I’ve picked up on the notion of badges. Digital badge systems assess and reward digital learning. This is a new concept for me (though they are used in online gaming and online communities), but it has amazing potential in schools and libraries. What if libraries had badge-earning workshops, or school library media specialists linked curricula to potential badges? The badge idea also seems to synch with the idea of an ePortfolio which is gaining ground. Digital badges inform others how to attain skills--the badges provide a pathway. I like this idea because I often wonder how people acquire certain skills, or how people were able to create certain artifacts. Learners’ badges are viewable online and are attached to individuals’ online profiles. New badges can be created as new technologies or skills emerge. More...