By Prof. Hacker. Are you a reader? A student of America’s founding? Interested in book history? We have an app for that. And we would love to show it to you. But a funny thing happened on the way to the App Store: Apple has rejected it, multiple times. Our attempt to produce an app designed to let readers interact with facsimiles of rare documents — in this case, the first printed editions of Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia, his only full-length book — is a story of great frustration for us, but, we hope, can be a cautionary tale for others who are thinking about the possibilities of developing educational and scholarly material for the iOS and the iPad. More...
Three cheers for the Mickey MOOCs University?
By Dennis Hayes. Massive open online courses, like too many modern universities, can only offer qualifications, not education. MOOCs, or massive open online courses, are part of an ‘avalanche’ that is coming for higher education, according to a report earlier this year by Sir Michael Barber. The former policy wonk, now employed as the chief education adviser at publishers Pearson, claimed that online courses will challenge the traditional university, in its physical campus form at least.
There is a lot of excitement about the number of students enrolled on MOOCs since the big three US providers launched in 2012 – the ‘year of the MOOC’. The biggest provider, Coursera, now claims over 4.5million ‘Courserians’; edX has one million students, while for-profit Udacity has more than 750,000 students. Futurelearn, the UK’s first MOOC provider, was launched in December 2012 and is about to open its portfolio of courses. Futurelearn is led by the Open University, which has over 240,000 students of its own and an historical status as an innovative distance-learning institution. Read more...



