Yesterday, 58 faculty members from the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard wrote an open letter to the dean requesting faculty oversight of HarvardX. When schools sign up for edX, their implementations tend to be called SchoolX, thus HarvardX specifically refers to their usage of the MOOC platform, not to the overall edX organization. […]
EdX
MOOCs Explained: Radio Interview with University of Delaware
Just over a week ago I had the opportunity to participate in a radio interview for the University of Delaware’s local station WVUD, with the Campus Voices interview airing on May 17th. The interview was in advance of Delaware’s summer faculty institute, where I will be speaking in just over a week. I really enjoyed the […]
Big 3 MOOC Providers Turning One Year Old
We are in the middle of the first anniversary of the creation of the big 3 MOOC providers (Coursera, Udacity, edX). Sebastian Thrun announced the creation of Udacity on January 23, 2012 as described by Reuters. Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng announced the creation of Coursera on April 18, 2012 in this NY Times article. […]
Six Ways the edX Announcement Gets Automated Essay Grading Wrong
Last week, edX made a splashy spectacle of an announcement about automated essay grading, leaving educators fuming. Let’s rethink their claims. “Give Professors a break,” the New York Times suggested in this joint press release from edX, Harvard, and MIT. The breathless story weaves a tale of robo-professors taking over the grading process, leaving professors […]
The Most Thorough Summary (to date) of MOOC Completion Rates
How many times have you heard the statement that ‘MOOCs have a completion rate of 10%’ or ‘MOOCs have a completion rate of less than 10%’? The meme seems to have developed a life of its own, but try to research the original claim and you might find a bunch of circular references or anecdotes […]
MOOCs in 2012: Dismantling the Status Quo
The dominant story in higher education for 2012 was clearly the rise of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), particularly the xMOOCs such as Coursera, Udacity, and edX. There has been a lot of debate on the merits of xMOOCs in terms of disruption, business model and academic quality. While I think these questions are interesting, […]
Is Coursera Facebook, Amazon, or Pets.com?
Before I get started, let me just say that Phil can vouch for the fact that I had already planned to use “Pets.com” in the title of this post before MIT Technology Review used it in their article on Minerva. As we’ll see, there are reasons to reach for that particular analogy at this particular moment […]