Tag Archives: MOOC

We need MOOTs, not MOOCs!

Just read this and I think it is a highly interesting texts. MOOCs are currently a big topic at many universities, yet dropout rates are as high as 97%. Here is a text by Harvard's Ned Hall that takes the entire concept into question and provides a couple of good points on why he does so.
MOOCs and MOOTs are different things, and we should be working a lot more on the latter than the former. A MOOT is a Massive Open Online Text, a flexible on-line teaching tool that combines searchable, comment-on-able text, multimedia, tools for peer-to-peer collaboration and feedback, and who knows what other goodies we haven't thought of yet.
 

MOOC on open science, free and open to all!

This course is a collaborative learning environment meant to introduce the idea of Open Science to young scientists, academics, and makers of all kinds.  Open Science is a tricky thing to define, but we've designed this course to share what we know about it; working as a community to make this open resource better.  Think of it as a layer on top of the way science is commonly done now.  Just better.
The course at PSPU starts August, 6th 2013. Sign up until August, 4th 2013.

Harvard profs consider Mooc ethics

Fifty-eight faculty members have called for Harvard University to create a new faculty committee to consider ethical issues related to edX, the entity created by the university and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to provide massive open online courses.
Times Higher Education. 

This video is of the “Copyright, Licensing, Open Access” session from the 18-19 March 2013 “MOOCs and Libraries: Massive Opportunity or Overwhelming Challenge?” event hosted by OCLC Research and the University of Pennsylvania Libraries. As courses are being offered online to a diverse and geographically distributed audience, what are the challenges for licensing and clearing copyright for materials used in courses? Are there opportunities for advancing the conversation on open access with faculty? Featuring Brandon Butler, Director of Public Policy Initiatives, Association of Research Libraries; Kevin Smith, Scholarly Communications Officer, Duke University; Kenny Crews, Director, Copyright Advisory Office, Columbia University; and Kyle K. Courtney, Manager of Faculty Research and Scholarship, Harvard Law School. See the MOOCs and Libraries event page athttp://www.oclc.org/research/events/2… for a complete overview of this event.
(Source: http://www.youtube.com/)

MOOC: The Real Digital Change Agent

Bryan Alexander, a senior fellow at the National Institute for Technology in Liberal Education, explores some potential explanations, including MOOCs’ relative novelty and their top-tier-university cachet. But the obvious answer is, as it nearly always is, money. For many institutions, MOOCs are viewed as a potential revenue stream, higher education’s business model of the future.
The Chronicle.

Higher education: our MP3 is the mooc

Higher education: our MP3 is the mooc

It’s been interesting watching this unfold in music, books, newspapers, TV, but nothing has ever been as interesting to me as watching it happen in my own back yard. Higher education is now being disrupted; our MP3 is the massive open online course (or mooc), and our Napster is Udacity, the education startup.

We have several advantages over the recording industry, of course. We are decentralised and mostly non-profit. We employ lots of smart people. We have previous examples to learn from, and our core competence is learning from the past. And armed with these advantages, we’re probably going to screw this up as badly as the music people did.

Clay Shirky. The Guardian.