Formation Continue du Supérieur

By Robert Talbert. Having a bad month, indeed. First it was this MOOC on “Fundamentals of Online Learning” that, ironically, had to be shut down for reasons involving the failure of online learning technology. Now it’s this course on “Microeconomics for Managers” in which the instructor, Richard McKenzie, walked away from the course.
You might argue that these two courses are the exceptions that prove the rule, since Coursera currently offers 222 courses, with more coming on the horizon and only two have melted down (at least publicly). Udacity did have a similar situation a while back, when a logic and discrete math course was cancelled before it began, due to “lack of quality”. Udacity does offer far fewer courses than Coursera at the moment, which makes this one “failure” stand out.
It raises the question – just how much thought is given to instructional design issues when MOOCs are drawn up? And a related question – how much peer review is given to MOOCs, and their professors, before they go public? Read more...

By Martine Durand, Director, OECD Directorate of Statistics. Did you know that, according to the UN Global Pulse, more data was created in 2011 than in the whole of human history, or at least, since the invention of the alphabet?
Technological and social innovations are resulting in huge flows of new data every day. This proliferation of so-called “big data” has the potential to change the way information is collected and used to inform policymaking.
New sources of data are increasingly providing real-time information to analysts and policy-makers. For example, it is now possible to collect price data on a wide range of goods and services with smartphones, and then calculate a daily price index. Similarly, job offers posted online provide a new source for analysing labour market trends, while data on Internet financial transactions and sales are increasingly used to forecast world output. At the same time, social networks such as Facebook and Twitter have already revolutionised the way policymakers interact with civil society. Governments use these networks both to push their messages out and to pull information in that may influence the design and targeting of policies as people place more of their personal information on social networking sites. Read more...