MOOCs for credit — from insidehighered.com by Scott Jaschik

Excerpt:

Two announcements this week suggest that MOOCs — massive open online courses — will increasingly include a route for students to receive academic credit.

Georgia State University announced Tuesday that it will start to review MOOCs for credit much like it reviews courses students have taken at other institutions, or exams they have taken to demonstrate competency in certain areas.

And Academic Partnerships, a company that works with public universities to put their degree programs online, announced an effort in which the first course of these programs can become a MOOC, with full credit awarded to those who successfully complete the course. The educational idea is that this offering will encourage more students to start degree programs. The financial idea is that the tuition revenue gained by participating institutions when students move from the MOOC to the rest of the program (which will continue to charge tuition) will offset the additional costs of offering the first course free.

 

From DSC:
I think MOOCs still need some work, but they tap into a blend of formal/structured learning and informal/unstructured learning that is attractive to many — not to mention that MOOCs offer people more choice/more control, chances for contribution and participation, greater ownership of the learning, and much lower costs.  As such, they continue to be a valuable experiment within higher education. They continue to usher in the era of what I call “The Walmart of Education”. They also provide students with a way to see if they are interested in a discipline without having to invest much $$ in the course(s).

Also see:

  • Free online college courses take big step forward — from forbes.com by Susan Adams
    Excerpt:
    Free online college classes known as “massive open online courses,” or MOOCs, have made another big stride toward changing the model for higher education. Dozens of public universities are planning to offer introductory MOOCs for credit to anyone with an internet connection around the world, according to a piece today in The New York Times. The universities, including Arizona State, the University of Cincinnati and the University of Arkansas system, are hoping that students who pass the free MOOCs will then enroll in the schools and pay tuition to earn a degree.

How free online courses are changing the traditional liberal arts education — from PBS.org
As tuition costs continue to rise, it seems counterintuitive that professors at top universities would give away their courses for free. But that’s exactly what they’re doing, on web-based platforms known as “Massive Open Online Courses.” Spencer Michels reports on how a boom in online learning could change higher education.

Excerpt from Under the cloud of knowledge deficiency — from xED Book by George Siemens:

I’ve been tagging interesting articles and websites since 2011 here on Diigo. My co-author, Bonnie Stewart, has been tagging MOOC articles here on Delicious. If you don’t feel like reading hundreds of articles, Sir John Daniel provides a solid analysis of MOOCs. Don’t forget to look at the peer reviewed MOOC articles. Several colleagues have found Clay “the McGuyver of MP3 metaphors – explaining all phenomenon in the world through the lens of MP3?s and Napster since 1999? Shirky’s evaluation of MOOCs helpful: Napster, Udacity, and the Academy.

Beyond the MOOC Hype: Answers to the five biggest MOOC questions (Part 1) — from the EvoLLLution NewsWire

Beyond the MOOC hype: Answers to the five biggest MOOC questions (Part 2) — from the EvoLLLution NewsWire

MOOCS, online learning, and the wrong conversation — from insidehighered.com by Joshua Kim

Excerpt:
  • Where are your institution’s strengths? 
  • What do you want to be known for?
  • Where have your faculty made a name for themselves in research and in global conversations? 
  • Can you use MOOCS to grow awareness of your strengths? 
  • Can you use blended and online learning to aggregate demand for degree programs in your specialization?  
  • Can you find mechanisms to invest in faculty, scholarship, courses, and teaching and learning? 
Addendums:

 

Great item here as well:

 

Also, addendums on 7/3/13:

Addendum on 7/8/13:

Abstract

Massive open online courses (MOOCs) are a recent addition to the range of online learning options. Since 2008, MOOCs have been run by a variety of public and elite universities, especially in North America. Many academics have taken interest in MOOCs recognising the potential to deliver education around the globe on an unprecedented scale; some of these academics are taking a research-oriented perspective and academic papers describing their research are starting to appear in the traditional media of peer reviewed publications. This paper presents a systematic review of the published MOOC literature (2008-2012): Forty-five peer reviewed papers are identified through journals, database searches, searching the Web, and chaining from known sources to form the base for this review. We believe this is the first effort to systematically review literature relating to MOOCs, a fairly recent but massively popular phenomenon with a global reach. The review categorises the literature into eight different areas of interest, introductory, concept, case studies, educational theory, technology, participant focussed, provider focussed, and other, while also providing quantitative analysis of publications according to publication type, year of publication, and contributors. Future research directions guided by gaps in the literature are explored.

Keywords: MOOC; massive open online course; massively open online course; systematic review; connectivism

 

 

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UK university joins US online partnership — from bbc.co.uk by Sean Coughlan BBC News education correspondent

 

Prof Daphne Koller, Co-Founder of Coursera and Professor Sir Timothy O'Shea, Principal of The University of Edinburgh
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Daphne Koller, co-founder of Coursera, and Edinburgh University’s principal,
Sir Timothy O’Shea, sign up to the online partnership

SanJoseStatePlus-UdacityPartnership-Jan2013

 

Also see:

Excerpt:

Today Udacity is thrilled to announce a partnership with San Jose State University to pilot three courses — Entry-Level Mathematics, College Algebra, and Elementary Statistics — available online at an affordable tuition rate and for college credit. To my knowledge, this is the first time a MOOC has been offered for credit and purely online. Much credit for this partnership goes to Mo Qayoumi and Ellen Junn, president and provost of SJSU, and to the five fearless SJSU professors who have chosen to work with us at Udacity to explore this new medium. The offices of Governor Brown and CSU Chancellor White have also been critically important to this partnership for their leadership and expediency. Last but not least, I want to personally thank our great Udacians who, like everyone on this list, have worked endless hours to drive innovation.
Over the past year, MOOCs have received a lot of attention in the media and education circles mostly because so many students are taking advantage of the course for free. Predictions that MOOCs would fundamentally change higher education often revolved around the fact that the courses have unprecedented reach and affordability.

 

From DSC:
Given that such “Walmarts of Education” (i.e. solid learning at a greatly reduced prices) continue to develop, what’s our/your plans for responding to this trend? How are we/you going to compete?  What’s our/your vision and strategy?  By the way, you can look all you want to for data — but at the end of the day, it’s likely with this sort of thing that you won’t find all of the data that you require to make a decision. Examples:

  • When I began working for Kraft Foods in 1990 (brought in to roll out email to 66 plants at the time), I believed in the power of email when few others did. Email was viewed as “fluff” and it would never be used for solid business practices; management put the project on hold. But I kept working with email at Kraft — trying to get others to use it. If you looked for data back then, you wouldn’t find it. But by the time I left Kraft in 1997, thousands of people could communicate with thousands of other people throughout the world — within minutes.
    .
  • When Alexander Graham Bell introduced the telephone, what data would support the success of his invention?  I suppose you could have pulled some data on the usage of the telegraph, but even then, vision would have had to trump the data (the ancestor of Western Union rejected his invention, as they questioned why anyone would need/use a telephone when there was already the telegraph in usage).
    .
  • Such technological developments often are not so easy to back up with data; they require some vision, experimentation, and risk taking.

 

Governor Jerry Brown, Udacity announce pilot program for $150 classes — from edsurge.com by Kris Hattori
San Jose State University will offer students three online classes from Udacity

From DSC:
In this series of periodic postings re: experimentation (see here and here), this week’s Consumers Electronics Show prompts me to think about different types of experiments, prompting such questions as:
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  • When will we see more educationally-related second screen apps?
    .
  • How might this type of setup dovetail with MOOCs provided by institutions of higher education? With MOOCs offered by the corporate world?
    .
  • What sorts of technologies will weave their way into what could be offered here?
    (The following possibilities come to my mind: Artificial Intelligence (AI), learning agents, recommendation engines, course or topic playlists, web-based learner profiles, data mining/analytics, videoconferencing, educational gaming, virtual tutoring, BYOD, and/or cloud-based computing. Other…?)
    .
  • Will Internet-enabled marketplaces and exchanges — between learners and teachers — become commonplace?
    .
  • Will technologies involved with endeavors like IBM’s Watson or with Knewton be deployed in this kind of convergent environment? If so, what sorts of doors/job opportunities/new skillsets would that open up or require?
    .

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The Living [Class] Room -- by Daniel Christian -- July 2012 -- a second device used in conjunction with a Smart/Connected TV

 

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Some relevant items on this include:

Flingo reveals Samba, a first of its kind dual interactive TV and second screen platform — from pandodaily.com byasdf

Excerpt:

This week at CES in Las Vegas (the Consumer Electronics Show), San Francisco-based Flingo will release the latest version of its platform, dubbed Samba, aimed at changing this. Samba will make four-year-old Flingo one of the first to offer a combined Interactive TV and Second Screen experience.

“We saw a surge of Smart TV and tablet adoption in 2012, but realized that a seamless TV experience across all screens was missing,” says Flingo co-founder and CEO Ashwin Navin, formerly of BitTorrent. “Samba will blur the lines between linear television and the Web.”

Flingo is unique in that it uses video, not audio to identify what content is being viewed…

Samba offers viewers the ability to actively engage with programming in real-time through their primary screen. This can take the form of polls, social conversations, recommendations, or consumption of related media. In the case of Second Screens, aka internet-connected laptops, tablets, and smartphones used simultaneously while watching TV, the company can offer an even wider array of complementary content and engagement, such as aggregated social feeds relating to live programming or an ability to watch past episodes of a live show. This can all be delivered across multiple screens, in concert.

 

Also see:

Smart TV Alliance adds Panasonic and IBM to its fold, lays bare new SDK features -- Sean Buckley

 

Also see:

 

samsung smart tv ces 2013

 

Kevin Smith/Business Insider

 

More tangentially, but still relevant:

  • McGraw-Hill to debut adaptive e-book for students — from blogs.wsj.com by Shalini Ramachandran
    Excerpt:

    The SmartBook…works like this: All readers essentially see the same textbook as they read for the first five minutes. But as a reader answers review questions placed throughout the chapter, different passages become highlighted to point the reader to where he or she should focus attention.

 

The power of the business matchmaker — from management.fortune.cnn.com by John Hagel and John Seely Brown
Matchmakers can connect millions of people looking to pair talent with jobs, buyers with vendors, tenants with landlords, etc. The Fortune 500 should take note.

From DSC:
Makes me wonder how many MOOCs will morph into matchmakers…and I continue to wonder if the corporate world will develop/use their own MOOCs and use them as pre-screening/filtering mechanisms…

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The Power of Online Exchanges -- graphic by Daniel Christian on 1/13/09

 

Developing a MOOC-inspired course — from the User Generated Education blog by Jackie Gerstein

Excerpt:

During Fall, 2012, I developed and taught a graduate course entitled, Social Networked Learning, for the Boise State University’s Educational Technology Program.  Most of the students were in-service K-12 educators. I provided an overview of the learning activities for this course in two previous blog posts.

Sample student projects from this course can be viewed at http://learni.st/users/jackiegerstein/boards/4710-social-networked-learning.

This was a new course in educational technology.  As is true for many of us using educational technology in the classroom, we are experimenting with how technology can enhance the learning experiences of our students.  Sometimes we have failures, often times we have successes.

Also see Jackie’s posting:

 

 

 

 

Massive List of MOOC Resources, Lit and Literati — from worldofwebcast.com by Erica St. Angel

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UK universities forge open online courses alliance: FutureLearn Consortium will offer uni-branded MOOCs starting next year — techcrunch.com by Natasha Lomas

Excerpt:

Today’s [12/13/12] news means even more MOOCs will be offered next year, as 12 UK universities are getting together to form a new company that will offer the online courses — under the brand name of FutureLearn Ltd. The universities are: Birmingham, Bristol, Cardiff, East Anglia, Exeter, King’s College London, LancasterLeedsSouthamptonSt Andrews and Warwick, along with UK distance-learning organization The Open University (OU).

 

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Looks like a very interesting set of tools/technologies out at livefyre.com — a piece of which is subtitled, the “Web’s first Engagement Management System.”
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  • How might this set of technologies/functionalities affect what’s possible with MOOCs?
    .
  • Could universities and colleges use something like this to talk to their constituencies?
    .
  • As the computer, the telephone, and the television continue to converge, what educationally-related opportunities might be possible here?

 

http://www.livefyre.com/

 

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http://www.livefyre.com/

 

Citing IT skills shortage, IBM wants to expand presence at universities — from wiredacademic.com

Excerpt (emphasis DSC):

“We want to be the scale up partner of choice for these universities,” said Jim Sporher, head of IBM’s university programs. “We want to make sure they have access to technology and understand our strategy.”  He also sees massive open online courses (MOOCs) as a mega-trend and will be considering ways for IBM to be part of the MOOC trend in the future, particularly as many of the MOOC providers such as Udacity and Coursera offer classes in computer science.

As a big blue-chip progenitor of the tech industry, IBM is worth listening to in many regards. For one, corporate computing trends often filter down into the education space. The corporate world often has the money to purchase and deploy game-changing technologies. IBM sees that it also works the other way too, where computing at the university level creates new businesses and ideas that move up into the corporate realm.

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From DSC:
I wonder…will the corporations develop their own MOOCs?  Their own digital “playlists” and associated exams? (i.e. that someone needs to go through and pass in order to work for them…show me what you can do.)  Hmmm…

Also see:

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McKinsey and Company -- Education to Employment -- An executive summary

 

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Also see:

 

Excerpt from edSurge’s 12-4-12 newsletter:

SO HOW WAS THAT MOOC FOR YA? First come the MOOCs, then come the reviews. First out of the box: Founded just six months ago, Knollop is a Yelp-like review and discovery site for MOOCs. It boasts courses from nine MOOCs: including Khan Academy, MIT, and Harvard, as well as favorites like edX, Udacity, and Coursera.

But Knollop has competition. A mere seven weeks ago, serial entrepreneur Jesse Spaulding (LunchTree, FourTonight) launched a rival site called CourseTalk. While CourseTalk features many of the same features as Knollop, it lists just 276 courses to Knollop’s 2,835.

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Berklee College of Music gives MOOCs a soundtrack, draws 80,000 students — from onlinecollegecourses.com by Alex Wukman

Excerpt:

When Berklee College of Music’s massive open online courses (MOOCs) launch in January they will be the first attempts to bring music education to the world of MOOCs.

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