In organizing the resignation of University of Virginia President Theresa Sullivan, Rector Helen E. Dragas may have expressed the concerns of many higher education boards of directors about the impact and effective use of education technology. Other Presidents and Chancellors may now have a similar career-threatening incentive. History in technology suggests a wave of implementation of “online courses” will follow when decision-makers are presented with similar press enthusiasm for a technology.
Tag: Coursera
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MOOCs: Two Different Approaches to Scale, Access and Experimentation
In part 1 of this series, I described a new landscape of educational delivery models. In part 2 I described the master course concept and how it presents a cultural barrier that most traditional institutions cannot cross, at least without a dedicated online organization or an outsourced partnership.
Why does it matter that we describe these educational delivery models with finer granularity than just traditional and online? Because the aims of the models differ, as do the primary methods of how these models are created and delivered.
With all of the recent interest in Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), it would be worth summarizing the two branches of MOOCs including recent posts or interviews by the founders of the concept.
Scale and Access
In most online programs, at least those with more than few thousand students, the delivery method of this scale is the duplication of course sections in the manner of tract housing (for a better description, see part 2). But are there other methods to achieve scale (and therefore access) without duplicating sections? MOOCs represent an alternate approach where the actual course itself provides scale, allowing essentially unlimited enrollment in the single course section in the manner of a large apartment building.